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THE   DEFENDANT 


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THE     DEFENDANT 

BY  G.  K.  CHESTERTON   £>  H- 

11*2- 

AUTHOR  OF  'THE  WILD  KNIGHT' 
AND   'GREYBEARDS    AT    PLAY' 


SECOND    EDITION 


LONDON.    MDCCCCII 
R.    BRIMLEY    JOHNSON 


The  '  Defences '  of  which  this  volume  is 
composed  have  appeared  in  The  Speaker, 
and  are  here  reprinted,  after  revision  and 
amplification,  by  permission  of  the  Editor. 
Portions  of  '  The  Defence  of  Publicity  '  ap- 
peared in  The  Daily  News. 

October,  1901. 


605228     C 


CONTENTS 


PACE 

IN  DEFENCE  OF  A  NEW  EDITION             -  -         ix 

INTRODUCTION            ...                -  -1 

A  DEFENCE   OF   PENNY  DREADFULS         -  -           8 

A  DEFENCE   OF   RASH  VOWS        -                -  -         IS 

A  DEFENCE   OF  SKELETONS          -                -  27 

A   DEFENCE   OF  PUBLICITY           -                -  34 

A  DEFENCE   OF  NONSENSE            -                -  42 

A  DEFENCE   OF   PLANETS               -                -  51 

A  DEFENCE   OF   CHINA   SHEPHERDESSES  -        59 

A   DEFENCE   OF   USEFUL   INFORMATION  -  G6 

A  DEFENCE   OF   HERALDRY           -                -  -        7G 

A  DEFENCE   OF   UGLY   THINGS    -                -  -82 

A  DEFENCE   OF  FARCE   -                -                -  -        8(J 

A  DEFENCE   OF   HUMILITY             -               -  97 

A  DEFENCE   OF  SLANG   -                -                -  -      105 

A  DEFENCE  OF  BABY-WORSHIP  -                -  -      112 

A   DEFENCE   OF  DETECTIVE   STORIES        -  -      118 

A  DEFENCE  OF  PATRIOTISM        -               -  -      124 


IN  DEFENCE   OF  A  NEW 
EDITION 

The  re-issue  of  a  series  of  essays  so  ephemeral, 
and  even  superfluous  may  seem  at  the  first 
glance  to  require  some  excuse ;  probably  the 
best  excuse  is  that  they  will  have  been  com- 
pletely forgotten,  and  therefore  may  be  read 
again  with  entirely  new  sensations.  I  am 
not  sure,  however,  that  this  claim  is  so  modest 
as  it  sounds,  for  I  fancy  that  Shakespeare 
and  Balzac,  if  moved  to  prayers,  might  not 
ask  to  be  remembered,  but  to  be  forgotten,  and 
forgotten  thus ;  for  if  they  were  forgotten  they 
would  be  everlastingly  re-discovered  and  re- 
read. It  is  a  monotonous  memory  which  keeps 
us  in  the  main  from  seeing  things  as  splendid 
as  they  are.  The  ancients  were  not  wrong 
when  they  made  Lethe  the  boundary  of  a 
better  land ;  perhaps  the  only  flaw  in  their 
system  is  that  a  man  who  had  bathed  in  the 
river  of  forgetfulness  icould  be  as  likely  as  not 
to  climb  back  upon  the  bank  of  the  earth  and 
fancy  himself  in  Elysium. 

If    therefore,   I    am    certain    that    most 


x     IN  DEFENCE  OF  A  NEW  EDITION 

sensible  people  have  forgotten  the  existence  of 
this  book — I  do  not  speak  in  modesty  or  in 
pride — /  wish  only  to  state  a  simple  a 
somewhat  beautiful  fact  In  one  respect  the 
passing  of  the  period  during  which  a  book  can. 
be  considered  current  lias  afflicted  me  with 
some  melancholy,  for  I  had  intended  to  write 
anonymously  in  some  daily  paper  a  thorough 
and  crushing  exposure  of  the  work  inspired 
mostly  by  a  certain  artistic  impatience  of  the 
too  indulgent  tone  of  the  critiques  and  the 
manner  in  which  a  vast  number  of  my  most 
monstrous  fallacies  have  passed  unchallenged. 
I  will  not  repeat  that  powerful  article  hen , 
for  it  cannot  be  necessary  to  do  anything  more 
than  warn  the  reader  against  the  perfectly 
indefensible  line  of  argument  adopted  at  the 
end  of  p.  28.  /  am  also  conscious  that  the 
title  of  the  book  is,  strictly  speaking,  inac- 
curate. It  is  a  legal  metaphor,  and,  speaking 
legally,  a  defendant  is  not  an  enthusiast  for 
the  character  of  King  John  or  the  domestic 
virtues  of  the  prairie-dog.  He  is  one  who 
defends  himself,  a  thing  which  the  present 
writer,  however  poisoned  his  mind  may  be 
with  paradox,  certainly  never  dreamed  of 
attempting. 

Criticism  upon  the  book  considered  as 
literature,  if  it  can  be  so  considered,  I  should, 
of  course,  never  dream  of  dismissing — firstly, 
because   it   is    ridiculous    to    do    so;    and, 


IN  DEFENCE  OF  A  NEW  EDITION    xi 

secondly,  because  there  was,  in  my  opinion, 
much  justice  in  such  criticism. 

But  there  is  one  matter  on  which  an  author 
is  generally  considered  as  having  a  rigid  to 
explain  himself,  since  it  has  nothing  to  do 
with  capacity  or  intelligence,  and  that  is  the 
question  of  his  morals. 

I  am  proud  to  say  that  a  furious,  uncom- 
promising, and  very  effective  attack  was  made 
upon  what  was  alleged  to  be  the  utter  immor- 
ality of  this  book,  by  my  excellent  friend 
Mr.  C.  F.  G.  Masterman,  in  the  '  Speaker.' 
The  tendency  of  that  criticism  was  to  the 
effect  that  I  was  discouraging  improvement 
and  disguising  scandals  by  my  offensive 
optimism.  Quoting  the  passage  in  which  I 
said  that  '  diamonds  were  to  be  found  in  the 
dust-bin,1  he  said:  '  There  is  no  difficulty  in 
finding  good  in  what  Immunity  rejects.  The 
difficulty  is  to  find  it  in  what  humanity 
accepts.  The  diamond  is  easy  enough  to  find 
in  the  dust-bin.  The  difficulty  is  to  find  it 
in  the  drawing-room.'  I  must  admit,  for  my 
part,  without  the  slightest  shame,  that  I  have 
■found  a  great  many  very  excellent  things  in 
drawing-rooms.  For  example,  I  found  Mr. 
Masterman  in  a  drawing-room,.  But  I 
merely  mention  this  purely  ethiccd  attack  in 
order  to  state,  in  as  few  sentences  as  possible, 
my  difference  from  the  theory  of  optimism  and 
progress  therein  enunciated.     At  first  sight 


xii    IN  DEFENCE  OF  A  NEW  EDITION 

it  would  seem  that  the  pessimist  encourages 
improvement.  But  in  reality  it  is  a  singular 
truth  that  the  era  in  which  pessimism  has  been 
cried  from  the  house-tops  is  also  that  in 
which  almost  all  reform  has  stagnated  and 
fallen  into  decay.  The  reason  of  this  is  not 
difficult  to  discover.  No  man  ever  did,  and 
no  man  ever  can,  create  or  desire  to  make  a 
bad  thing  good  or  an  ugly  thing  beautiful. 
There  must  be  some  germ  of  good  to  be  loved, 
some  fragment  of  beauty  to  be  admired.  The 
mother  washes  and  decks  out  the  dirty  or  care- 
less child,  but  no  one  can  ask  her  to  wash  and 
deck  out  a  goblin  icith  a  heart  like  hell.  Xo 
one  can  kill  the  fatted  calf  for  Mephistopheles. 
The  cause  which  is  blocking  all  progress  to- 
day is  the  subtle  scepticism  which  whispers  in 
a  million  ears  that  things  are  not  good  enough 
to"  be  worth  improving.  If  the  world  is  good 
we  are  revolutionaries,  if  the  world  is  evil  ice 
must  be  conservatives.  These  essays,  futile 
as  they  are  considered  as  serious  literature, 
are  yet  ethically  sincere,  since  they  seek  to 
remind  men  that  things  must  be  loved  first 
and  improved  afterwards. 

G.  K.  C. 


THE    DEFENDANT 


INTRODUCTION 

IN  certain  endless  uplands,  uplands  like 
great  flats  gone  dizzy,  slopes  that 
seem  to  contradict  the  idea  that  there  is 
even  such  a  thing  as  a  level,  and  make  us 
all  realize  that  we  live  on  a  planet  with  a 
sloping  roof,  you  will  come  from  time  to 
time  upon  whole  valleys  filled  with  loose 
rocks  and  boulders,  so  big  as  to  be  like 
mountains  broken  loose.  The  whole  might 
be  an  experimental  creation  shattered  and 
cast  away.  It  is  often  difficult  to  believe 
that  such  cosmic  refuse  can  have  come 
together  except  by  human  means.  The 
mildest  and  most  cockney  imagination 
conceives  the  place  to  be  the  scene  of  some 
war  of  giants.  To  me  it  is  always  as- 
sociated with  one  idea,  recurrent  and  at 
last  instinctive.  The  scene  was  the  scene 
of  the  stoning  of  some  prehistoric  prophet, 

1 


2  THE  DEFENDANT 

a  prophet  as  much  more  gigantic  than 
after-prophets  as  the  boulders  are  more 
gigantic  than  the  pebbles.  He  spoke 
some  words — words  that  seemed  shameful 
and  tremendous — and  the  world,  in  terror, 
buried  him  under  a  wilderness  of  stones. 
The  place  is  the  monument  of  an  ancient 
fear. 

If  we  followed  the  same  mood  of  fancv, 
it  would  be  more  difficult  to  imagine  what 
awful  hint  or  wild  picture  of  the  universe 
called  forth  that  primal  persecution,  what 
secret  of  sensational  thought  lies  buried 
under  the  brutal  stones.  For  in  our  time 
the  blasphemies  are  threadbare.  Pessi- 
mism is  now  patently,  as  it  always  was 
essentially,  more  commonplace  than  piety. 
Profanity  is  now  more  than  an  affectation 
— it  is  a  convention.  The  curse  against 
God  is  Exercise  I.  in  the  primer  of  minor 
poetry.  It  was  not,  assuredly,  for  such 
babyish  solemnities  that  our  imaginary 
prophet  was  stoned  in  the  morning  of  the 
world.  If  we  weigh  the  matter  in  the 
faultless  scales  of  imagination,  if  we  see 
what  is  the  real  trend  of  humanity,  we 
shall  feel  it  most  probable  that  he  was 
stoned  for  saying  that  the  grass  was  green 
and  that  the  birds  sang  in  spring  ;  for  the 
mission  of  all  the  prophets  from  the  begin- 
ning has  not  been  so  much  the  pointing 


INTRODUCTION  3 

out  of  heavens  or  hells  as  primarily  the 
pointing  out  of  the  earth. 

Religion  has  had  to  provide  that  longest 
and  strangest  telescope  —  the  telescope 
through  which  we  could  see  the  star  upon 
which  we  dwelt.  For  the  mind  and  eyes 
of  the  average  man  this  world  is  as  lost  as 
Eden  and  as  sunken  as  Atlantis.  There 
runs  a  strange  law  through  the  length  of 
human  history — that  men  are  continually 
tending  to  undervalue  their  environment, 
to  undervalue  their  happiness,  to  under- 
value themselves.  The  great  sin  of  man- 
kind, the  sin  typified  by  the  fall  of 
Adam,  is  the  tendency,  not  towards  pride, 
but  towards  this  weird  and  horrible 
humility. 

This  is  the  great  fall,  the  fall  by  which 
the  fish  forgets  the  sea,  the  ox  forgets  the 
meadow,  the  clerk  forgets  the  city,  every 
man  forgets  his  environment  and,  in  the 
fullest  and  most  literal  sense,  forgets  him- 
self. This  is  the  real  fall  of  Adam,  and  it 
is  a  spiritual  fall.  It  is  a  strange  thing  that 
many  truly  spiritual  men,  such  as  General 
Gordon,  have  actually  spent  some  hours 
in  speculating  upon  the  precise  location  of 
the  Garden  of  Eden.  Most  probably  we 
are  in  Eden  still.  It  is  only  our  eyes  that 
have  changed. 

The  pessimist  is  commonly  spoken  of  as 

1—2 


4  THE  DEFENDANT 

the  man  in  revolt.  He  is  not.  Firstly, 
because  it  requires  some  cheerfulness  to 
continue  in  revolt,  and  secondly,  because 
pessimism  appeals  to  the  weaker  side  of 
everybody,  and  the  pessimist,  therefore, 
drives  as  roaring  a  trade  as  the  publican. 
The  person  who  is  really  in  revolt  is  the 
optimist,  who  generally  lives  and  dies  in  a 
desperate  and  suicidal  effort  to  persuade 
all  the  other  people  how  good  they  are. 
It  has  been  proved  a  hundred  times  over 
that  if  you  really  wish  to  enrage  people 
and  make  them  angry,  even  unto  death, 
the  right  way  to  do  it  is  to  tell  them  that 
they  are  all  the  sons  of  God.  Jesus 
Christ  was  crucified,  it  may  be  remem- 
bered, not  because  of  anything  he  said 
about  God,  but  on  a  charge  of  saying  that 
a  man  could  in  three  days  pull  down  and 
rebuild  the  Temple.  Every  one  of  the 
great  revolutionists,  from  Isaiah  to  Shelley, 
have  been  optimists.  They  have  been 
indignant,  not  about  the  badness  of  exist- 
ence, but  about  the  slowness  of  men  in 
realizing  its  goodness.  The  prophet  who 
is  stoned  is  not  a  brawler  or  a  marplot. 
He  is  simply  a  rejected  lover.  He  surfers 
from  an  unrequited  attachment  to  things 
in  general. 

It  becomes  increasingly  apparent,  there- 
fore,   that   the  world   is  in  a   permanent 


INTRODUCTION  5 

danger  of  being  misjudged.  That  this  is 
no  fanciful  or  mystical  idea  may  be  tested 
by  simple  examples.  The  two  absolutely 
basic  words  '  good  '  and  '  bad,'  descriptive 
of  two  primal  and  inexplicable  sensations, 
are  not,  and  never  have  been,  used  properly. 
Things  that  are  bad  are  not  called  good 
by  any  people  who  experience  them ;  but 
things  that  are  good  are  called  bad  by  the 
universal  verdict  of  humanity. 

Let  me  explain  a  little  :  Certain  things 
are  bad  so  far  as  they  go,  such  as  pain,  and 
no  one,  not  even  a  lunatic,  calls  a  tooth- 
ache good  in  itself ;  but  a  knife  which  cuts 
clumsily  and  with  difficulty  is  called  a  bad 
knife,  which  it  certainly  is  not.  It  is  only 
not  so  good  as  other  knives  to  which  men 
have  grown  accustomed.  A  knife  is  never 
bad  except  on  such  rare  occasions  as  that 
in  which  it  is  neatly  and  scientifically 
planted  in  the  middle  of  one's  back.  The 
coarsest  and  bluntest  knife  which  ever 
broke  a  pencil  into  pieces  instead  of 
sharpening  it  is  a  good  thing  in  so  far  as 
it  is  a  knife.  It  would  have  appeared  a 
miracle  in  the  Stone  Age.  What  we  call  a 
bad  knife  is  a  good  knife  not  good  enough 
for  us  ;  what  we  call  a  bad  hat  is  a  good 
hat  not  good  enough  for  us ;  what  we  call 
bad  cookery  is  good  cookery  not  good 
enough  for  us  ;  what  we  call  a  bad  civiliza- 


6  THE  DEFENDANT 

tion  is  a  good  civilization  not  good  enough 
for  us.  We  choose  to  call  the  great  mass 
of  the  history  of  mankind  bad,  not  because 
it  is  bad,  but  because  we  are  better.  This 
is  palpably  an  unfair  principle.  Ivory 
may  not  be  so  white  as  snow,  but  the 
whole  Arctic  continent  does  not  make  ivory 
black. 

Now  it  has  appeared  to  me  unfair  that 
humanity  should  be  engaged  perpetually 
in  calling  all  those  things  bad  which  have 
been  good  enough  to  make  other  things 
better,  in  everlastingly  kicking  down  the 
ladder  by  which  it  has  climbed.  It  has 
appeared  to  me  that  progress  should  be 
something  else  besides  a  continual  parri- 
cide ;  therefore  I  have  investigated  the 
dust-heaps  of  humanity,  and  found  a 
treasure  in  all  of  them.  I  have  found  that 
humanity  is  not  incidentally  engaged,  but 
eternally  and  systematically  engaged,  in 
throwing  gold  into  the  gutter  and 
diamonds  into  the  sea.  I  have  found  that 
every  man  is  disposed  to  call  the  green 
leaf  of  the  tree  a  little  less  green  than  it 
is,  and  the  snow  of  Christmas  a  little  less 
white  than  it  is  ;  therefore  I  have  imagined 
that  the  main  business  of  a  man,  however 
humble,  is  defence.  I  have  conceived  that 
a    defendant    is    chiefly    required     when 


INTRODUCTION  7 

worldlings  despise  the  world  —  that  a 
counsel  for  the  defence  would  not  have 
been  out  of  place  in  that  terrible  day  when 
the  sun  was  darkened  over  Calvary  and 
Man  was  rejected  of  men. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PENNY 
DREADFULS 

ONE  of  the  strangest  examples  of  the 
degree  to  which  ordinary  life  is  under- 
valued is  the  example  of  popular  literature, 
the  vast  mass  of  which  we  contentedly 
describe  as  vulgar.  The  boy's  novelette 
may  be  ignorant  in  a  literary  sense,  which 
is  only  like  saying  that  a  modern  novel  is 
ignorant  in  the  chemical  sense,  or  the 
economic  sense,  or  the  astronomical  sense ; 
but  it  is  not  vulgar  intrinsically — it  is  the 
actual  centre  of  a  million  flaming  imagina- 
tions. 

In  former  centuries  the  educated  class 
ignored  the  ruck  of  vulgar  literature. 
They  ignored,  and  therefore  did  not, 
properly  speaking,  despise  it.  Simple 
ignorance  and  indifference  does  not  inflate 
the  character  with  pride.  A  man  does 
not  walk  down  the  street  giving  a  haughty 
twirl  to  his  moustaches  at  the  thought  of 
his  superiority  to  some  variety  of  deep-sea 
fishes.  The  old  scholars  left  the  whole 
under-world  of  popular  compositions  in  a 
similar  darkness. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PENNY  DREADFULS  9 

To-day,  however,  we  have  reversed  this 
principle.  We  do  despise  vulgar  composi- 
tions, and  we  do  not  ignore  them.  We 
are  in  some  danger  of  becoming  petty  in 
our  study  of  pettiness ;  there  is  a  terrible 
Circean  law  in  the  background  that  if  the 
soul  stoops  too  ostentatiously  to  examine 
anything  it  never  gets  up  again.  There 
is  no  class  of  vulgar  publications  about 
which  there  is,  to  my  mind,  more  utterly 
ridiculous  exaggeration  and  misconception 
than  the  current  boys'  literature  of  the 
lowest  stratum.  This  class  of  composition 
has  presumably  always  existed,  and  must 
exist.  It  has  no  more  claim  to  be  good 
literature  than  the  daily  conversation  of 
its  readers  to  be  fine  oratory,  or  the 
lodging-houses  and  tenements  they  inhabit 
to  be  sublime  architecture.  But  people 
must  have  conversation,  they  must  have 
houses,  and  they  must  have  stories.  The 
simple  need  for  some  kind  of  ideal  world 
in  which  fictitious  persons  play  an  un- 
hampered part  is  infinitely  deeper  and 
older  than  the  rules  of  good  art,  and  much 
more  important.  Every  one  of  us  in  child- 
hood has  constructed  such  an  invisible 
dramatis  persona?,  but  it  never  occurred 
to  our  nurses  to  correct  the  composi- 
tion by  careful  comparison  with  Balzac. 
In  the  East   the  professional  story-teller 


10  THE  DEFENDANT 

goes  from  village  to  village  with  a  small 
carpet ;  and  I  wish  sincerely  that  anyone 
had  the  moral  courage  to  spread  that 
carpet  and  sit  on  it  in  Ludgate  Circus. 
But  it  is  not  probable  that  all  the  tales 
of  the  carpet-bearer  are  little  gems  of 
original  artistic  workmanship.  Literature 
and  fiction  are  two  entirely  different 
things.  Literature  is  a  luxury ;  fiction  is 
a  necessity.  A  work  of  art  can  hardly  be 
too  short,  for  its  climax  is  its  merit.  A 
story  can  never  be  too  long,  for  its  conclu- 
sion is  merely  to  be  deplored,  like  the  last 
halfpenny  or  the  last  pipelight.  And  so, 
while  the  increase  of  the  artistic  conscience 
tends  in  more  ambitious  works  to  brevity 
and  impressionism,  voluminous  industry 
still  marks  the  producer  of  the  true 
romantic  trash.  There  was  no  end  to  the 
ballads  of  Robin  Hood  ;  there  is  no  end  to 
the  volumes  about  Dick  Deadshot  and  the 
Avenging  Nine.  These  two  heroes  are 
deliberately  conceived  as  immortal. 

But  instead  of  basing  all  discussion  of 
the  problem  upon  the  common -sense  recog- 
nition of  this  fact — that  the  youth  of  the 
lower  orders  always  has  had  and  always 
must  have  formless  and  endless  romantic 
reading  of  some  kind,  and  then  going  on 
to  make  provision  for  its  wholesomeness — 
we  begin,  generally  speaking,  by  fantastic 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PENNY  DREADFULS  11 

abuse  of  this  reading  as  a  whole  and 
indignant  surprise  that  the  errand-boys 
under  discussion  do  not  read  '  The  Egoist ' 
and  'The  Master  Builder.'  It  is  the 
custom,  particularly  among  magistrates,  to 
attribute  half  the  crimes  of  the  Metropolis 
to  cheap  novelettes.  If  some  grimy 
urchin  runs  away  with  an  apple,  the 
magistrate  shrewdly  points  out  that  the 
child's  knowledge  that  apples  appease 
hunger  is  traceable  to  some  curious 
literary  researches.  The  boys  themselves, 
when  penitent,  frequently  accuse  the 
novelettes  with  great  bitterness,  which  is 
only  to  be  expected  from  young  people 
possessed  of  no  little  native  humour.  If 
I  had  forged  a  will,  and  could  obtain 
sympathy  by  tracing  the  incident  to  the 
influence  of  Mr.  George  Moore's  novels, 
I  should  find  the  greatest  entertainment 
in  the  diversion.  At  any  rate,  it  is  firmly 
fixed  in  the  minds  of  most  people  that 
gutter-boys,  unlike  everybody  else  in  the 
community,  find  their  principal  motives 
for  conduct  in  printed  books. 

Now  it  is  quite  clear  that  this  objection, 
the  objection  brought  by  magistrates,  has 
nothing  to  do  with  literary  merit.  Bad 
story  writing  is  not  a  crime.  Mr.  Hall 
Caine  walks  the  streets  openly,  and  cannot 
be  put  in  prison  for  an  anticlimax.       The 


12  THE  DEFENDANT 

objection  rests  upon  the  theory  that  the 
tone  of  the  mass  of  boys'  novelettes  is 
criminal  and  degraded,  appealing  to  low 
cupidity  and  low  cruelty.  This  is  the  magis- 
terial theory,  and  this  is  rubbish. 

So  far  as  I  have  seen  them,  in  connection 
with  the  dirtiest  book-stalls  in  the  poorest 
districts,  the  facts  are  simply  these  :  The 
whole  bewildering  mass  of  vulgar  juvenile 
literature  is  concerned  with  adventures, 
rambling,  disconnected  and  endless.  It 
does  not  express  any  passion  of  any  sort, 
for  there  is  no  human  character  of  any  sort. 
It  runs  eternally  in  certain  grooves  of  local 
and  historical  type :  the  medieval  knight, 
the  eighteenth-century  duellist,  and  the 
modern  cowboy,  recur  with  the  same  stiff 
simplicity  as  the  conventional  human 
figures  in  an  Oriental  pattern.  I  can  quite 
as  easily  imagine  a  human  being  kindling 
wild  appetites  by  the  contemplation  of  his 
Turkey  carpet  as  by  such  dehumanized  and 
naked  narrative  as  this. 

Among  these  stories  there  are  a  certain 
number  which  deal  sympathetically  with  the 
adventures  of  robbers,  outlaws  and  pirates, 
which  present  in  a  dignified  and  romantic 
light  thieves  and  murderers  like  Dick  Turpin 
and  Claude  Duval.  That  is  to  say,  they  do 
precisely  the  same  thing  as  Scott's  '  Ivan- 
hoe,'  Scott's  'Rob  Roy,'  Scott's  'Lady  of 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PENNY  DREADFULS  13 

the  Lake,'  Byron's  '  Corsair,'  Wordsworth's 
'Rob  Roy's  Grave,'  Stevenson's  '  Macaire,' 
Mr.  Max  Pemberton's  '  Iron  Pirate,'  and  a 
thousand  more  works  distributed  systemati- 
cally as  prizes  and  Christmas  presents. 
Nobody  imagines  that  an  admiration  of 
Locksley-  in  '  Ivanhoe '  will  lead  a  boy  to 
shoot  Japanese  arrows  at  the  deer  in  Rich- 
mond Park ;  no  one  thinks  that  the  in- 
cautious opening  of  Wordsworth  at  the 
poem  on  Rob  Roy  will  set  him  up  for  life 
as  a  blackmailer.  In  the  case  of  our  own 
class,  we  recognise  that  this  wild  life  is 
contemplated  with  pleasure  by  the  young, 
not  because  it  is  like  their  own  life,  but 
because  it  is  different  from  it.  It  might  at 
least  cross  our  minds  that,  for  whatever 
other  reason  the  errand-boy  reads  '  The 
Red  Revenge,'  it  really  is  not  because  he  is 
dripping  with  the  gore  of  his  own  friends 
and  relatives. 

In  this  matter,  as  in  all  such  matters, 
we  lose  our  bearings  entirely  by  speaking 
of  the  '  lower  classes '  when  we  mean 
humanity  minus  ourselves.  This  trivial 
romantic  literature  is  not  especially 
plebeian :  it  is  simply  human.  The 
philanthropist  can  never  forget  classes  and 
callings.  He  says,  with  a  modest  swagger, 
'  I  have  invited  twenty-five  factory  hands 
to  tea.'    If  he  said  '  I  have  invited  twenty- 


14  THE  DEFENDANT 

five  chartered  accountants  to  tea,'  every- 
one would  see  the  humour  of  so  simple  a 
classification.  But  this  is  what  we  have 
done  with  this  lumberland  of  foolish  writ- 
ing :  we  have  probed,  as  if  it  were  some 
monstrous  new  disease,  what  is,  in  fact, 
nothing  but  the  foolish  and  valiant  heart 
of  man.  Ordinary  men  will  always  be 
sentimentalists :  for  a  sentimentalist  is 
simply  a  man  who  has  feelings  and  does 
not  trouble  to  invent  a  new  way  of  express- 
ing them.  These  common  and  current 
publications  have  nothing  essentially  evil 
about  them.  They  express  the  sanguine 
and  heroic  truisms  on  which  civilization  is 
built ;  for  it  is  clear  that  unless  civilization 
is  built  on  truisms,  it  is  not  built  at  all. 
Clearly,  there  could  be  no  safety  for  a 
society  in  which  the  remark  by  the  Chief 
Justice  that  murder  was  wrong  was 
regarded  as  an  original  and  dazzling 
epigram. 

If  the  authors  and  publishers  of  '  Dick 
Deadshot,'  and  such  remarkable  works, 
were  suddenly  to  make  a  raid  upon  the 
educated  class,  were  to  take  down  the 
names  of  every  man,  however  distinguished, 
who  was  caught  at  a  University  Extension 
Lecture,  were  to  confiscate  all  our  novels 
and  warn  us  all  to  correct  our  lives,  we 
should   be   seriously   annoyed.     Yet   they 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PENNY  DREADFULS  15 

have  far  more  right  to  do  so  than  we ;  for 
they,  with  all  their  idiotcy,  are  normal  and 
we  are  abnormal.     It  is  the  modern  litera- 
ture of  the  educated,  not  of  the  uneducated, 
which  is  avowedly  and  aggressively  criminal. 
Books  recommending  profligacy  and  pessi- 
mism, at  which  the  high-souled  errand-boy 
would  shudder,  lie  upon  all  our  drawing- 
room  tables.     If  the  dirtiest  old  owner  of 
the  dirtiest  old  bookstall  in  Whitechapel 
dared  to  display  works  really  recommend- 
ing polygamy  or  suicide,  his  stock  would 
be  seized  by  the  police.     These  things  are 
our   luxuries.     And  with    a   hypocrisy  so 
ludicrous  as  to  be  almost  unparalleled  in 
history,  we  rate  the  gutter-boys  for  their 
immorality  at  the  very  time  that  we  are 
discussing  (with  equivocal  German  Profes- 
sors) whether  morality  is  valid  at  all.     At 
the  very  instant  that  we  curse  the  Penny 
Dreadful  for  encouraging  thefts  upon  pro- 
perty, we  canvass  the  proposition  that  all 
property  is  theft.     At   the   very   instant 
we  accuse  it  (quite  unjustly)  of  lubricity 
and  indecency,  we  are  cheerfully  reading 
philosophies  which  glory  in  lubricity  and 
indecency.     At  the  very  instant  that  we 
charge  it  with  encouraging  the  young  to 
destroy   life,    we    are    placidly   discussing 
whether  life  is  worth  preserving. 

But  it  is  we  who  are  the  morbid  excep- 


16  THE  DEFENDANT 

tions ;  it  is  we  who  are  the  criminal  class. 
This  should  be  our  great  comfort.  The 
vast  mass  of  humanity,  with  their  vast 
mass  of  idle  books  and  idle  words,  have 
never  doubted  and  never  will  doubt  that 
courage  is  splendid,  that  fidelity  is  noble, 
that  distressed  ladies  should  be  rescued, 
and  vanquished  enemies  spared.  There 
are  a  large  number  of  cultivated  persons 
who  doubt  these  maxims  of  daily  life,  just 
as  there  are  a  large  number  of  persons  who 
believe  they  are  the  Prince  of  Wales  ;  and 
I  am  told  that  both  classes  of  people  are 
entertaining  conversationalists.  But  the 
average  man  or  boy  writes  daily  in  these 
great  gaudy  diaries  of  his  soul,  which  we 
call  Penny  Dreadfuls,  a  plainer  and  better 
gospel  than  any  of  those  iridescent  ethical 
paradoxes  that  the  fashionable  change  as 
often  as  their  bonnets.  It  may  be  a  very 
limited  aim  in  morality  to  shoot  a  '  many- 
faced  and  fickle  traitor,'  but  at  least  it  is  a 
better  aim  than  to  be  a  many-faced  and 
fickle  traitor,  which  is  a  simple  summary 
of  a  good  many  modern  systems  from  Mr. 
d'Annunzio's  downwards.  So  long  as  the 
coarse  and  thin  texture  of  mere  current 
popular  romance  is  not  touched  by  a  paltry 
culture  it  will  never  be  vitally  immoral. 
It  is  always  on  the  side  of  life.  The  poor 
— the   slaves  who  really  stoop  under  the 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PENNY  DREADFULS  17 

burden  of  life  —  have  often  been  mad, 
scatter-brained  and  cruel,  but  never  hope- 
less. That  is  a  class  privilege,  like  cigars. 
Their  drivelling  literature  will  always 
be  a  '  blood  and  thunder '  literature,  as 
simple  as  the  thunder  of  heaven  and  the 
blood  of  men. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  EASH  VOWS 

IF  a  prosperous  modern  man,  with  a  high 
hat  and  a  frock-coat,  were  to  solemnly 
pledge  himself  before  all  his  clerks  and 
friends  to  count  the  leaves  on  every  third 
tree  in  Holland  Walk,  to  hop  up  to  the  City 
on  one  leg  every  Thursday,  to  repeat  the 
whole  of  Mill's  '  Liberty '  seventy-six  times, 
to  collect  300  dandelions  in  fields  belong- 
ing to  anyone  of  the  name  of  Brown,  to 
remain  for  thirty-one  hours  holding  his  left 
ear  in  his  right  hand,  to  sing  the  names 
of  all  his  aunts  in  order  of  age  on  the  top 
of  an  omnibus,  or  make  any  such  unusual 
undertaking,  we  should  immediately  con- 
clude that  the  man  was  mad,  or,  as  it 
is  sometimes  expressed,  was  '  an  artist  in 
life.'  Yet  these  vows  are  not  more  extra- 
ordinary than  the  vows  which  in  the  Middle 
Ages  and  in  similar  periods  were  made, 
not  by  fanatics  merely,  but  by  the  greatest 
figures  in  civic  and  national  civilization — 
by  kings,  judges,  poets,  and  priests.  One 
man  swore  to  chain  two  mountains  to- 
gether, and  the  great  chain  hung  there,  it 
was  said,  for  ages  as  a  monument  of  that 


A  DEFENCE  OF  RASH  VOWS        19 

mystical  folly.  Another  swore  that  he 
would  find  his  way  to  Jerusalem  with  a 
patch  over  his  eyes,  and  died  looking  for 
it.  It  is  not  easy  to  see  that  these  two 
exploits,  judged  from  a  strictly  rational 
standpoint,  are  any  saner  than  the  acts 
above  suggested.  A  mountain  is  com- 
monly a  stationary  and  reliable  object 
which  it  is  not  necessary  to  chain  up  at 
night  like  a  dog.  And  it  is  not  easy  at 
first  sight  to  see  that  a  man  pays  a  very 
high  compliment  to  the  Holy  City  by 
setting  out  for  it  under  conditions  which 
render  it  to  the  last  degree  improbable  that 
he  will  ever  get  there. 

But  about  this  there  is  one  striking 
thing  to  be  noticed.  If  men  behaved  in 
that  way  in  our  time,  we  should,  as  we 
have  said,  regard  them  as  symbols  of  the 
'  decadence.'  But  the  men  who  did  these 
things  were  not  decadent ;  they  belonged 
generally  to  the  most  robust  classes  of 
what  is  generally  regarded  as  a  robust 
age.  Again,  it  will  be  urged  that  if  men 
essentially  sane  performed  such  insanities, 
it  was  under  the  capricious  direction  of  a 
superstitious  religious  system.  This,  again, 
will  not  hold  water ;  for  in  the  purely 
terrestrial  and  even  sensual  departments 
of  life,  such  as  love  and  lust,  the  medieval 
princes  show  the  same  mad  promises  and 

2—2 


20  THE  DEFENDANT 

performances,  the  same  misshapen  imagina- 
tion and  the  same  monstrous  self-sacrifice. 
Here  we  have  a  contradiction,  to  explain 
which  it  is  necessary  to  think  of  the  whole 
nature  of  vows  from  the  beginning.  And 
if  we  consider  seriously  and  correctly  the 
nature  of  vows,  we  shall,  unless  I  am  much 
mistaken,  come  to  the  conclusion  that  it  is 
perfectly  sane,  and  even  sensible,  to  swear 
to  chain  mountains  together,  and  that,  if 
insanity  is  involved  at  all,  it  is  a  little 
insane  not  to  do  so. 

The  man  who  makes  a  vow  makes  an 
appointment  with  himself  at  some  distant 
time  or  place.  The  danger  of  it  is  that 
himself  should  not  keep  the  appointment. 
And  in  modern  times  this  terror  of  one's 
self,  of  the  weakness  and  mutability  of 
one's  self,  has  perilously  increased,  and  is 
the  real  basis  of  the  objection  to  vows  of 
any  kind.  A  modern  man  refrains  from 
swearing  to  count  the  leaves  on  every 
third  tree  in  Holland  Walk,  not  because  it 
is  silly  to  do  so  (he  does  many  sillier  things), 
but  because  he  has  a  profound  conviction 
that  before  he  had  got  to  the  three  hundred 
and  seventy-ninth  leaf  on  the  first  tree  he 
would  be  excessively  tired  of  the  subject 
and  want  to  go  home  to  tea.  In  other 
words,  we  fear  that  by  that  time  he  will 
be,  in  the  common  but  hideously  significant 


A  DEFENCE  OF  RASH  VOWS        21 

phrase,  another  man.  Now,  it  is  this 
horrible  fairy  tale  of  a  man  constantly 
changing  into  other  men  that  is  the  soul  of 
the  decadence.  That  John  Paterson  should, 
with  apparent  calm,  look  forward  to  being 
a  certain  General  Barker  on  Monday,  Dr. 
Macgregor  on  Tuesday,  Sir  Walter  Car- 
stairs  on  Wednesday,  and  Sam  Slugg  on 
Thursday,  may  seem  a  nightmare  ;  but  to 
that  nightmare  we  give  the  name  of  modern 
culture.  One  great  decadent,  who  is  now 
dead,  published  a  poem  some  time  ago,  in 
which  he  powerfully  summed  up  the  whole 
spirit  of  the  movement  by  declaring  that  he 
could  stand  in  the  prison  yard  and  entirely 
comprehend  the  feelings  of  a  man  about  to 
be  hanged  : 

1  For  he  that  lives  more  lives  than  one 
More  deaths  than  one  must  die.' 

And  the  end  of  all  this  is  that  madden- 
ing horror  of  unreality  which  descends 
upon  the  decadents,  and  compared  with 
which  physical  pain  itself  would  have  the 
freshness  of  a  youthful  thing.  The  one 
hell  which  imagination  must  conceive  as 
most  hellish  is  to  be  eternally  acting  a 
play  without  even  the  narrowest  and 
dirtiest  greenroom  in  which  to  be  human. 
And  this  is  the  condition  of  the  decadent, 
of  the  aesthete,  of  the  free-lover.     To  be 


22  THE  DEFENDANT 

everlastingly  passing  through  dangers 
which  we  know  cannot  scathe  us,  to  be 
taking  oaths  which  we  know  cannot  bind 
us,  to  be  defying  enemies  who  we  know 
cannot  conquer  us — this  is  the  grinning 
tyranny  of  decadence  which  is  called 
freedom. 

Let  us  turn,  on  the  other  hand,  to  the 
maker  of  vows.  The  man  who  made  a 
vow,  however  wild,  gave  a  healthy  and 
natural  expression  to  the  greatness  of  a 
great  moment.  He  vowed,  for  example, 
to  chain  two  mountains  together,  perhaps 
a  symbol  of  some  great  relief,  or  love,  or 
aspiration.  Short  as  the  moment  of  his 
resolve  might  be,  it  was,  like  all  great 
moments,  a  moment  of  immortality,  and 
the  desire  to  say  of  it  exegi  monumentum 
cere  perennhts  was  the  only  sentiment  that 
would  satisfy  his  mind.  The  modern  aes- 
thetic man  would,  of  course,  easily  see  the 
emotional  opportunity  ;  he  would  vow  to 
chain  two  mountains  together.  But,  then, 
he  would  quite  as  cheerfully  vow  to  chain 
the  earth  to  the  moon.  And  the  wither- 
ing consciousness  that  he  did  not  mean 
what  he  said,  that  he  was,  in  truth,  saying 
nothing  of  any  great  import,  would  take 
from  him  exactly  that  sense  of  daring 
actuality  which  is  the  excitement  of  a  vow. 
For  what  could  be  more  maddening  than 


A  DEFENCE  OF  RASH  VOWS        23 

an  existence  in  which  our  mother  or  aunt 
received  the  information  that  we  were 
going  to  assassinate  the  King  or  build  a 
temple  on  Ben  Nevis  with  the  genial  com- 
posure of  custom  ? 

The  revolt  against  vows  has  been  carried 
in  our  day  even  to  the  extent  of  a  revolt 
against  the  typical  vow  of  marriage.  It  is 
most  amusing  to  listen  to  the  opponents  of 
marriage  on  this  subject.  They  appear  to 
imagine  that  the  ideal  of  constancy  was  a 
yoke  mysteriously  imposed  on  mankind  by 
the  devil,  instead  of  being,  as  it  is,  a  yoke 
consistently  imposed  by  all  lovers  on  them- 
selves. They  have  invented  a  phrase,  a 
phrase  that  is  a  black  and  white  contradic- 
tion in  two  words — '  free-love ' — as  if  a 
lover  ever  had  been,  or  ever  could  be,  free. 
It  is  the  nature  of  love  to  bind  itself,  and 
the  institution  of  marriage  merely  paid  the 
average  man  the  compliment  of  taking  him 
at  his  word.  Modern  sages  offer  to  the 
lover,  with  an  ill-flavoured  grin,  the  largest 
liberties  and  the  fullest  irresponsibility ; 
but  they  do  not  respect  him  as  the  old 
Church  respected  him  ;  they  do  not  write 
his  oath  upon  the  heavens,  as  the  record 
of  his  highest  moment.  They  give  him 
every  liberty  except  the  liberty  to  sell  his 
liberty,  which  is  the  only  one  that  he 
wants. 


24  THE  DEFENDANT 

In  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw's  brilliant  play 
'  The  Philanderer,'  we  have  a  vivid  picture 
of  this  state  of  things.  Charteris  is  a  man 
perpetually  endeavouring  to  be  a  free- 
lover,  which  is  like  endeavouring  to  be  a 
married  bachelor  or  a  white  negro.  He  is 
wandering  in  a  hungry  search  for  a  certain 
exhilaration  which  he  can  only  have  when 
he  has  the  courage  to  cease  from  wander- 
ing. Men  knew  better  than  this  in  old 
times — in  the  time,  for  example,  of  Shake- 
speare's heroes.  When  Shakespeare's  men 
are  really  celibate  they  praise  the  un- 
doubted advantages  of  celibacy,  liberty, 
irresponsibility,  a  chance  of  continual 
change.  But  they  were  not  such  fools  as 
to  continue  to  talk  of  liberty  when  they 
were  in  such  a  condition  that  they  could 
be  made  happy  or  miserable  by  the  moving 
of  someone  else's  eyebrow.  Suckling 
classes  love  with  debt  in  his  praise  of 
freedom. 

•  And  he  that's  fairly  out  of  both 
Of  all  the  world  is  blest. 
He  lives  as  in  the  golden  age, 
When  all  things  made  were  common ; 
He  takes  his  pipe,  he  takes  his  glass, 
He  fears  no  man  or  woman.' 

This  is  a  perfectly  possible,  rational  and 
manly  position.     But  what  have  lovers  to 


A  DEFENCE  OF  RASH  VOWS        25 

do  with  ridiculous  affectations  of  fearing 
no  man  or  woman  ?  They  know  that  in 
the  turning  of  a  hand  the  whole  cosmic 
engine  to  the  remotest  star  may  become 
an  instrument  of  music  or  an  instrument 
of  torture.  They  hear  a  song  older  than 
Suckling's,  that  has  survived  a  hundred 
philosophies.  '  Who  is  this  that  looketh 
out  of  the  window,  fair  as  the  sun,  clear 
as  the  moon,  terrible  as  an  army  with 
banners  V 

As  we  have  said,  it  is  exactly  this  back- 
door, this  sense  of  having  a  retreat  behind 
us,  that  is,  to  our  minds,  the  sterilizing 
spirit  in  modern  pleasure.  Everywhere 
there  is  the  persistent  and  insane  attempt 
to  obtain  pleasure  without  paying  for  it. 
Thus,  in  politics  the  modern  Jingoes  practi- 
cally say,  '  Let  us  have  the  pleasures  of 
conquerors  without  the  pains  of  soldiers  : 
let  us  sit  on  sofas  and  be  a  hardy  race.' 
Thus,  in  religion  and  morals,  the  decadent 
mystics  say  :  '  Let  us  have  the  fragrance  of 
sacred  purity  without  the  sorrows  of  self- 
restraint  ;  let  us  sing  hymns  alternately  to 
the  Virgin  and  Priapus.'  Thus  in  love  the 
free-lovers  say  :  '  Let  us  have  the  splendour 
of  offering  ourselves  without  the  peril  of 
committing  ourselves  ;  let  us  see  whether 
one  cannot  commit  suicide  an  unlimited 
number  of  times.' 


26  THE  DEFENDANT 

Emphatically  it  will  not  work.  There 
are  thrilling  moments,  doubtless,  for  the 
spectator,  the  amateur,  and  the  aesthete ; 
but  there  is  one  thrill  that  is  known  only 
to  the  soldier  who  fights  for  his  own  flag, 
to  the  ascetic  who  starves  himself  for  his 
own  illumination,  to  the  lover  who  makes 
finally  his  own  choice.  And  it  is  this 
transfiguring  self- discipline  that  makes 
the  vow  a  truly  sane  thing.  It  must  have 
satisfied  even  the  giant  hunger  of  the  soul 
of  a  lover  or  a  poet  to  know  that  in  conse- 
quence of  some  one  instant  of  decision  that 
strange  chain  would  hang  for  centuries  in 
the  Alps  among  the  silences  of  stars  and 
snows.  All  around  us  is  the  city  of  small 
sins,  abounding  in  backways  and  retreats, 
but  surely,  sooner  or  later,  the  towering 
flame  will  rise  from  the  harbour  announc- 
ing that  the  reign  of  the  cowards  is  over 
and  a  man  is  burning  his  ships. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SKELETONS 

SOME  little  time  ago  I  stood  among 
immemorial  English  trees  that  seemed 
to  take  hold  upon  the  stars  like  a  brood 
of  Ygdrasils.  As  I  walked  among  these 
living  pillars  I  became  gradually  aware 
that  the  rustics  who  lived  and  died  in 
their  shadow  adopted  a  very  curious  con- 
versational tone.  They  seemed  to  be  con- 
stantly apologizing  for  the  trees,  as  if  they 
were  a  very  poor  show.  After  elaborate 
investigation,  I  discovered  that  their 
gloomy  and  penitent  tone  was  traceable 
to  the  fact  that  it  was  winter  and  all  the 
trees  were  bare.  I  assured  them  that  I 
did  not  resent  the  fact  that  it  was  winter, 
that  I  knew  the  thing  had  happened 
before,  and  that  no  forethought  on  their 
part  could  have  averted  this  blow  of 
destiny.  But  I  could  not  in  any  way 
reconcile  them  to  the  fact  that  it  was 
winter.  There  was  evidently  a  general 
feeling  that  I  had  caught  the  trees  in  a 
kind  of  disgraceful  deshabille,  and  that  they 
ought  not  to  be  seen  until,  like  the  first 
human  sinners,   they  had   covered   them- 


28  THE  DEFENDANT 

selves  with  leaves.  So  it  is  quite  clear 
that,  while  very  few  people  appear  to  know 
anything  of  how  trees  look  in  winter,  the 
actual  foresters  know  less  than  anyone.  So 
far  from  the  line  of  the  tree  when  it  is  bare 
appearing  harsh  and  severe,  it  is  luxuriantly 
indefinable  to  an  unusual  degree ;  the 
fringe  of  the  forest  melts  away  like  a 
vignette.  The  tops  of  two  or  three  high 
trees  when  they  are  leafless  are  so  soft 
that  they  seem  like  the  gigantic  brooms  of 
that  fabulous  lady  who  was  sweeping  the 
cobwebs  off  the  sky.  The  outline  of  a 
leafy  forest  is  in  comparison  hard,  gross 
and  blotchy  ;  the  clouds  of  night  do  not 
more  certainly  obscure  the  moon  than 
those  green  and  monstrous  clouds  obscure 
the  tree ;  the  actual  sight  of  the  little 
wood,  with  its  gray  and  silver  sea  of  life, 
is  entirely  a  winter  vision.  So  dim  and 
delicate  is  the  heart  of  the  winter  woods, 
a  kind  of  glittering  gloaming,  that  a  figure 
stepping  towards  us  in  the  chequered  twi- 
light seems  as  if  he  were  breaking  through 
unfathomable  depths  of  spiders'  webs. 

But  surely  the  idea  that  its  leaves  are 
the  chief  grace  of  a  tree  is  a  vulgar  one, 
on  a  par  with  the  idea  that  his  hair  is  the 
chief  grace  of  a  pianist.  When  winter, 
that  healthy  ascetic,  carries  his  gigantic 
razor  over  hill  and  valley,  and  shaves  all 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SKELETONS         29 

the  trees  like  monks,  we  feel  surely  that 
they  are  all  the  more  like  trees  if  they 
are  shorn,  just  as  so  many  painters  and 
musicians  would  be  all  the  more  like  men 
if  they  were  less  like  mops.  But  it  does 
appear  to  be  a  deep  and  essential  difficulty 
that  men  have  an  abiding  terror  of  their 
own  structure,  or  of  the  structure  of  things 
they  love.  This  is  felt  dimly  in  the 
skeleton  of  the  tree  :  it  is  felt  profoundly 
in  the  skeleton  of  the  man. 

The  importance  of  the  human  skeleton 
is  very  great,  and  the  horror  with  which  it 
is  commonly  regarded  is  somewhat  mys- 
terious. Without  claiming  for  the  human 
skeleton  a  wholly  conventional  beauty,  we 
may  assert  that  he  is  certainly  not  uglier 
than  a  bull-dog,  whose  popularity  never 
wanes,  and  that  he  has  a  vastly  more 
cheerful  and  ingratiating  expression.  But 
just  as  man  is  mysteriously  ashamed  of 
the  skeletons  of  the  trees  in  winter,  so  he 
is  mysteriously  ashamed  of  the  skeleton  of 
himself  in  death.  It  is  a  singular  thing 
altogether,  this  horror  of  the  architecture 
of  things.  One  would  think  it  would  be 
most  unwise  in  a  man  to  be  afraid  of  a 
skeleton,  since  Nature  has  set  curious  and 
quite  insuperable  obstacles  to  his  running 
away  from  it. 

One   ground   exists   for   this   terror  :  a 


30  THE  DEFENDANT 

strange  idea  has  infected  humanity  that 
the  skeleton  is  typical  of  death.  A  man 
might  as  well  say  that  a  factory  chimney 
was  typical  of  bankruptcy.  The  factory 
may  be  left  naked  after  ruin,  the  skeleton 
may  be  left  naked  after  bodily  dissolution  ; 
but  both  of  them  have  had  a  lively  and 
workmanlike  life  of  their  own,  all  the 
pulleys  creaking,  all  the  wheels  turning,  in 
the  House  of  Livelihood  as  in  the  House 
of  Life.  There  is  no  reason  why  this  crea- 
ture (new,  as  I  fancy,  to  art),  the  living 
skeleton,  should  not  become  the  essential 
symbol  of  life. 

The  truth  is  that  man's  horror  of  the 
skeleton  is  not  horror  of  death  at  all.  It 
is  man's  eccentric  glory  that  he  has  not, 
generally  speaking,  any  objection  to  being 
dead,  but  has  a  very  serious  objection  to 
being  undignified.  And  the  fundamental 
matter  which  troubles  him  in  the  skeleton 
is  the  reminder  that  the  ground-plan  of  his 
appearance  is  shamelessly  grotesque.  I  do 
not  know  why  he  should  object  to  this. 
He  contentedly  takes  his  place  in  a  world 
that  does  not  pretend  to  be  genteel — a 
laughing,  working,  jeering  world.  He  sees 
millions  of  animals  carrying,  with  quite  a 
dandified  levity,  the  most  monstrous  shapes 
and  appendages,  the  most  preposterous 
horns,    wings,    and    legs,   when   they   are 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SKELETONS         31 

necessary  to  utility.  He  sees  the  good 
temper  of  the  frog,  the  unaccountable 
happiness  of  the  hippopotamus.  He  sees 
a  whole  universe  which  is  ridiculous,  from 
the  animalcule,  with  a  head  too  big  for  its 
body,  up  to  the  comet,  with  a  tail  too  big 
for  its  head.  But  when  it  comes  to  the 
delightful  oddity  of  his  own  inside,  his 
sense  of  humour  rather  abruptly  deserts 
him. 

In  the  Middle  Ages  and  in  the  Renais- 
sance (which  was,  in  certain  times  and 
respects,  a  much  gloomier  period)  this  idea 
of  the  skeleton  had  a  vast  influence  in 
freezing  the  pride  out  of  all  earthly  pomps 
and  the  fragrance  out  of  all  fleeting  plea- 
sures. But  it  was  not,  surely,  the  mere 
dread  of  death  that  did  this,  for  these 
were  ages  in  which  men  went  to  meet 
death  singing ;  it  was  the  idea  of  the 
degradation  of  man  in  the  grinning  ugli- 
ness of  his  structure  that  withered  the 
juvenile  insolence  of  beauty  and  pride. 
And  in  this  it  almost  assuredly  did  more 
good  than  harm.  There  is  nothing  so  cold 
or  so  pitiless  as  youth,  and  youth  in  aristo- 
cratic stations  and  ages  tended  to  an  im- 
peccable dignity,  an  endless  summer  of 
success  which  needed  to  be  very  sharply 
reminded  of  the  scorn  of  the  stars.  It  was 
well  that  such  flamboyant  prigs  should  be 


32  THE  DEFENDANT 

convinced  that  one  practical  joke,  at  least, 
would  bowl  them  over,  that  they  would 
fall  into  one  grinning  man-trap,  and  not 
rise  again.  That  the  whole  structure  of 
their  existence  was  as  wholesomely  ridicu- 
lous as  that  of  a  pig  or  a  parrot  they  could 
not  be  expected  to  realize  ;  that  birth  was 
humorous,  coming  of  age  humorous,  drink- 
ing and  fighting  humorous,  they  were  far 
too  young  and  solemn  to  know.  But  at 
least  they  were  taught  that  death  was 
humorous. 

There  is  a  peculiar  idea  abroad  that  the 
value  and  fascination  of  what  we  call 
Nature  lie  in  her  beauty.  But  the  fact 
that  Nature  is  beautiful  in  the  sense  that 
a  dado  or  a  Liberty  curtain  is  beautiful,  is 
only  one  of  her  charms,  and  almost  an 
accidental  one.  The  highest  and  most 
valuable  quality  in  Nature  is  not  her 
beauty,  but  her  generous  and  defiant  ugli- 
ness. A  hundred  instances  might  be  taken. 
The  croaking  noise  of  the  rooks  is,  in  itself, 
as  hideous  as  the  whole  hell  of  sounds  in  a 
London  railway  tunnel.  Yet  it  uplifts  us 
like  a  trumpet  with  its  coarse  kindliness 
and  honesty,  and  the  lover  in  '  Maud  '  could 
actually  persuade  himself  that  this  abomi- 
nable noise  resembled  his  lady-love's  name. 
Has  the  poet,  for  whom  Nature  means  only 
roses  and  lilies,  ever  heard  a  pig  grunting  ? 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SKELETONS         33 

It  is  a  noise  that  does  a  man  good — a 
strong,  snorting,  imprisoned  noise,  break- 
ing its  way  out  of  unfathomable  dungeons 
through  every  possible  outlet  and  organ.  It 
might  be  the  voice  of  the  earth  itself, 
snoring  in  its  mighty  sleep.  This  is  the 
deepest,  the  oldest,  the  most  wholesome 
and  religious  sense  of  the  value  of  Nature 
— the  value  which  comes  from  her  immense 
babyishness.  She  is  as  top-heavy,  as 
grotesque,  as  solemn  and  as  happy  as  a 
child.  The  mood  does  come  when  we  see 
all  her  shapes  like  shapes  that  a  baby 
scrawls  upon  a  slate — simple,  rudimentary, 
a  million  years  older  and  stronger  than  the 
whole  disease  that  is  called  Art.  The 
objects  of  earth  and  heaven  seem  to  com- 
bine into  a  nursery  tale,  and  our  relation 
to  things  seems  for  a  moment  so  simple  that 
a  dancing  lunatic  would  be  needed  to  do 
justice  to  its  lucidity  and  levity.  The 
tree  above  my  head  is  flapping  like  some 
gigantic  bird  standing  on  one  leg ;  the 
moon  is  like  the  eye  of  a  Cyclops.  And, 
however  much  my  face  clouds  with  sombre 
vanity,  or  vulgar  vengeance,  or  contemp- 
tible contempt,  the  bones  of  my  skull 
beneath  it  are  laughing  for  ever. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PUBLICITY 

IT  is  a  very  significant  fact  that  the 
form  of  art  in  which  the  modern 
world  has  certainly  not  improved  upon  the 
ancient  is  what  may  roughly  be  called  the 
art  of  the  open  air.  Public  monuments 
have  certainly  not  improved,  nor  has  the 
criticism  of  them  improved,  as  is  evident 
from  the  fashion  of  condemning  such  a 
large  number  of  them  as  pompous.  An 
interesting  essay  might  be  written  on  the 
enormous  number  of  words  that  are  used 
as  insults  when  they  are  really  compli- 
ments. It  is  in  itself  a  singular  study  in 
that  tendency  which,  as  I  have  said,  is 
always  making  things  out  worse  than 
they  are,  and  necessitating  a  systematic 
attitude  of  defence.  Thus,  for  example, 
some  dramatic  critics  cast  contempt  upon 
a  dramatic  performance  by  calling  it 
theatrical,  which  simply  means  that  it  is 
suitable  to  a  theatre,  and  is  as  much  a 
compliment  as  calling  a  poem  poetical. 
Similarly  we  speak  disdainfully  of  a  certain 
kind  of  work  as  sentimental,  which  simply 
means  possessing  the  admirable  and  essen- 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PUBLICITY         35 

tial  quality  of  sentiment.  Such  phrases 
are  all  parts  of  one  peddling  and  cowardly 
philosophy,  and  remind  us  of  the  days 
when  '  enthusiast '  was  a  term  of  reproach. 
But  of  all  this  vocabulary  of  unconscious 
eulogies  nothing  is  more  striking  than  the 
word  'pompous.' 

Properly  speaking,  of  course,  a  public 
monument  ought  to  be  pompous.  Pomp 
is  its  very  object ;  it  would  be  absurd  to 
have  columns  and  pyramids  blushing  in 
some  coy  nook  like  violets  in  the  woods 
of  spring.  And  public  monuments  have 
in  this  matter  a  great  and  much-needed 
lesson  to  teach.  Valour  and  mercy  and 
the  great  enthusiasms  ought  to  be  a  great 
deal  more  public  than  they  are  at  present. 
We  are  too  fond  nowadays  of  committing 
the  sin  of  fear  and  calling  it  the  virtue  of 
reverence.  We  have  forgotten  the  old 
and  wholesome  morality  of  the  Book  of 
Proverbs,  '  Wisdom  crieth  without ;  her 
voice  is  heard  in  the  streets.'  In  Athens 
and  Florence  her  voice  was  heard  in  the 
streets.  They  had  an  outdoor  life  of  war 
and  argument,  and  they  had  what  modern 
commercial  civilization  has  never  had — an 
outdoor  art.  Religious  services,  the  most 
sacred  of  all  things,  have  always  been  held 
publicly  ;  it  is  entirely  a  new  and  debased 
notion  that  sanctity  is  the  same  as  secrecy. 

3—2 


36  THE  DEFENDANT 

A  great  many  modern  poets,  with  the 
most  abstruse  and  delicate  sensibilities, 
love  darkness,  when  all  is  said  and  done, 
much  for  the  same  reason  that  thieves 
love  it.  The  mission  of  a  great  spire  or 
statue  should  be  to  strike  the  spirit  with 
a  sudden  sense  of  pride  as  with  a  thunder- 
bolt. It  should  lift  us  with  it  into  the 
empty  and  ennobling  air.  Along  the  base 
of  every  noble  monument,  whatever  else 
may  be  written  there,  runs  in  invisible 
letters  the  lines  of  Swinburne  : 

'  This  thing  is  God  : 
To  be  man  with  thy  might, 

To  go  straight  in  the  strength  of  thy  spirit,  and  live 
out  thy  life  in  the  light.' 

If  a  public  monument  does  not  meet  this 
first  supreme  and  obvious  need,  that  it 
should  be  public  and  monumental,  it  fails 
from  the  outset. 

There  has  arisen  lately  a  school  of 
realistic  sculpture,  which  may  perhaps  be 
better  described  as  a  school  of  sketchy 
sculpture.  Such  a  movement  was  right 
and  inevitable  as  a  reaction  from  the  mean 
and  dingy  pomposity  of  English  Victorian 
statuary.  Perhaps  the  most  hideous  and 
depressing  object  in  the  universe — far 
more  hideous  and  depressing  than  one  of 
Mr.  H.  G.  Wells's  shapeless  monsters  of 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PUBLICITY         37 

the  slime  (and  not  at  all  unlike  them) — is 
the  statue  of  an  English  philanthropist. 
Almost  as  bad,  though,  of  course,  not 
quite  as  bad,  are  the  statues  of  English 
politicians  in  Parliament  Fields.  Each  of 
them  is  cased  in  a  cylindrical  frock-coat, 
and  each  carries  either  a  scroll  or  a 
dubious -looking  garment  over  the  arm 
that  might  be  either  a  bathing-towel  or  a 
light  great-coat.  Each  of  them  is  in  an 
oratorical  attitude,  which  has  all  the  dis- 
advantage of  being  affected  without  even 
any  of  the  advantages  of  being  theatrical. 
Let  no  one  suppose  that  such  abortions 
arise  merely  from  technical  demerit.  In 
every  line  of  those  leaden  dolls  is  expressed 
the  fact  that  they  were  not  set  up  with 
any  heat  of  natural  enthusiasm  for  beauty 
or  dignity.  They  were  set  up  mechani- 
cally, because  it  would  seem  indecorous 
or  stingy  if  they  were  not  set  up.  They 
were  even  set  up  sulkily,  in  a  utilitarian 
age  which  was  haunted  by  the  thought 
that  there  were  a  great  many  more  sensible 
ways  of  spending  money.  So  long  as  this 
is  the  dominant  national  sentiment,  the 
land  is  barren,  statues  and  churches  will 
not  grow — for  they  have  to  grow,  as  much 
as  trees  and  flowers.  But  this  moral  dis- 
advantage which  lay  so  heavily  upon  the 
early  Victorian  sculpture  lies  in  a  modi- 


38  THE  DEFENDANT 

fied  degree  upon  that  rough,  picturesque, 
commonplace  sculpture  which  has  begun 
to  arise,  and  of  which  the  statue  of  Darwin 
in  the  South  Kensington  Museum  and  the 
statue  of  Gordon  in  Trafalgar  Square  are 
admirable  examples.  It  is  not  enough  for 
a  popular  monument  to  be  artistic,  like  a 
black  charcoal  sketch  ;  it  must  be  striking ; 
it  must  be  in  the  highest  sense  of  the  word 
sensational ;  it  must  stand  for  humanity  ; 
it  must  speak  for  us  to  the  stars  ;  it  must 
declare  in  the  face  of  all  the  heavens  that 
when  the  longest  and  blackest  catalogue 
has  been  made  of  all  our  crimes  and  follies 
there  are  some  things  of  which  we  men  are 
not  ashamed. 

The  two  modes  of  commemorating  a 
public  man  are  a  statue  and  a  biography. 
They  are  alike  in  certain  respects,  as,  for 
example,  in  the  fact  that  neither  of  them 
resembles  the  original,  and  that  both  of 
them  commonly  tone  down  not  only  all  a 
man's  vices,  but  all  the  more  amusing  of 
his  virtues.  But  they  are  treated  in  one 
respect  differently.  We  never  hear  any- 
thing about  biography  without  hearing 
something  about  the  sanctity  of  private 
life  and  the  necessity  for  suppressing  the 
whole  of  the  most  important  part  of  a 
man's  existence.  The  sculptor  does  not 
work  at  this  disadvantage.     The  sculptor 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PUBLICITY         39 

does  not  leave  out  the  nose  of  an  eminent 
philanthropist  because  it  is  too  beautiful 
to  be  given  to  the  public ;  he  does  not 
depict  a  statesman  with  a  sack  over  his 
head  because  his  smile  was  too  sweet  to 
be  endurable  in  the  light  of  day.  But  in 
biography  the  thesis  is  popularly  and 
solidly  maintained,  so  that  it  requires  some 
courage  even  to  hint  a  doubt  of  it,  that 
the  better  a  man  was,  the  more  truly 
human  life  he  led,  the  less  should  be  said 
about  it. 

For  this  idea,  this  modern  idea  that 
sanctity  is  identical  with  secrecy,  there  is 
one  thing  at  least  to  be  said.  It  is  for  all 
practical  purposes  an  entirely  new  idea  ; 
it  was  unknown  to  all  the  ages  in  which 
the  idea  of  sanctity  really  flourished.  The 
record  of  the  great  spiritual  movements  of 
mankind  is  dead  against  the  idea  that 
spirituality  is  a  private  matter.  The  most 
awful  secret  of  every  man's  soul,  its  most 
lonely  and  individual  need,  its  most  primal 
and  psychological  relationship,  the  thing 
called  worship,  the  communication  between 
the  soul  and  the  last  reality — this  most 
private  matter  is  the  most  public  spectacle 
in  the  world.  Anyone  who  chooses  to 
walk  into  a  large  church  on  Sunday  morn- 
ing may  see  a  hundred  men  each  alone 
with  his  Maker.     He  stands,  in  truth,  in 


40  THE  DEFENDANT 

the  presence  of  one  of  the  strangest  spec- 
tacles in  the  world — a  mob  of  hermits. 
And  in  thus  definitely  espousing  publicity 
by  making  public  the  most  internal 
mystery,  Christianity  acts  in  accordance 
with  its  earliest  origins  and  its  terrible 
beginning.  It  was  surely  by  no  accident 
that  the  spectacle  which  darkened  the  sun 
at  noonday  was  set  upon  a  hill.  The 
martyrdoms  of  the  early  Christians  were 
public  not  only  by  the  caprice  of  the 
oppressor,  but  by  the  whole  desire  and 
conception  of  the  victims. 

The  mere  grammatical  meaning  of  the 
word  '  martyr '  breaks  into  pieces  at  a 
blow  the  whole  notion  of  the  privacy  of 
goodness.  The  Christian  martyrdoms  were 
more  than  demonstrations  :  they  were  ad- 
vertisements. In  our  day  the  new  theory 
of  spiritual  delicacy  would  desire  to  alter 
all  this.  It  would  permit  Christ  to  be 
crucified  if  it  was  necessary  to  His  Divine 
nature,  but  it  would  ask  in  the  name  of 
good  taste  why  He  could  not  be  crucified 
in  a  private  room.  It  would  declare  that 
the  act  of  a  martyr  in  being  torn  in  pieces 
by  lions  was  vulgar  and  sensational,  though, 
of  course,  it  would  have  no  objection  to 
being  torn  in  pieces  by  a  lion  in  one's  own 
parlour  before  a  circle  of  really  intimate 
friends. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PUBLICITY         41 

It  is,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  a  decadent 
and  diseased  purity  which  has  inaugurated 
this  notion  that  the  sacred  object  must  be 
hidden.  The  stars  have  never  lost  their 
sanctity,  and  they  are  more  shameless  and 
naked  and  numerous  than  advertisements 
of  Pears'  soap.  It  would  be  a  strange  world 
indeed  if  Nature  was  suddenly  stricken 
with  this  ethereal  shame,  if  the  trees  grew 
with  their  roots  in  the  air  and  their  load 
of  leaves  and  blossoms  underground,  if  the 
flowers  closed  at  dawn  and  opened  at 
sunset,  if  the  sunflower  turned  towards 
the  darkness,  and  the  birds  flew,  like  bats, 
by  night. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  NONSENSE 

THERE  are  two  equal  and  eternal  ways 
of  looking  at  this  twilight  world  of 
ours  :  we  may  see  it  as  the  twilight  of 
evening  or  the  twilight  of  morning ;  we 
may  think  of  anything,  down  to  a  fallen 
acorn,  as  a  descendant  or  as  an  ancestor. 
There  are  times  when  we  are  almost  crushed, 
not  so  much  with  the  load  of  the  evil  as 
with  the  load  of  the  goodness  of  humanity, 
when  we  feel  that  we  are  nothing  but  the 
inheritors  of  a  humiliating  splendour.  But 
there  are  other  times  when  everything 
seems  primitive,  when  the  ancient  stars  are 
only  sparks  blown  from  a  boy's  bonfire, 
when  the  whole  earth  seems  so  young  and 
experimental  that  even  the  white  hair  of 
the  aged,  in  the  fine  biblical  phrase,  is 
like  almond-trees  that  blossom,  like  the 
white  hawthorn  grown  in  May.  That  it  is 
good  for  a  man  to  realize  that  he  is  '  the 
heir  of  all  the  ages '  is  pretty  commonly 
admitted ;  it  is  a  less  popular  but  equally 
important  point  that  it  is  good  for  him 
sometimes  to  realize  that  he  is  not  only 
an    ancestor,   but    an    ancestor    of   primal 


A  DEFENCE  OF  NONSENSE  43 

antiquity ;  it  is  good  for  him  to  wonder 
whether  he  is  not  a  hero,  and  to  experience 
ennobling  doubts  as  to  whether  he  is  not  a 
solar  myth. 

The  matters  which  most  thoroughly 
evoke  this  sense  of  the  abiding  childhood 
of  the  world  are  those  which  are  really 
fresh,  abrupt  and  inventive  in  any  age ; 
and  if  we  were  asked  what  was  the  best 
proof  of  this  adventurous  youth  in  the 
nineteenth  century  we  should  say,  with  all 
respect  to  its  portentous  sciences  and 
philosophies,  that  it  was  to  be  found  in  the 
rhymes  of  Mr.  Edward  Lear  and  in  the 
literature  of  nonsense.  '  The  Dong  with  the 
Luminous  Nose,'  at  least,  is  original,  as  the 
first  ship  and  the  first  plough  were  original. 

It  is  true  in  a  certain  sense  that  some  of 
the  greatest  writers  the  world  has  seen — 
Aristophanes,  Rabelais  and  Sterne — have 
written  nonsense ;  but  unless  we  are 
mistaken,  it  is  in  a  widely  different  sense. 
The  nonsense  of  these  men  was  satiric — 
that  is  to  say,  symbolic ;  it  was  a  kind  of 
exuberant  capering  round  a  discovered 
truth.  There  is  all  the  difference  in  the 
world  between  the  instinct  of  satire,  which, 
seeing  in  the  Kaiser's  moustaches  some- 
thing typical  of  him,  draws  them  continually 
larger  and  larger  ;  and  the  instinct  of 
nonsense  which,  for  no  reason  whatever, 


44  THE  DEFENDANT 

imagines  what  those  moustaches  would  look 
like  on  the  present  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury if  he  grew  them  in  a  fit  of  absence  of 
mind.  We  incline  to  think  that  no  age 
except  our  own  could  have  understood  that 
the  Quangle  -  Wangle  meant  absolutely 
nothing,  and  the  Lands  of  the  Jumblies 
were  absolutely  nowhere.  We  fancy  that 
if  the  account  of  the  knave's  trial  in  '  Alice 
in  Wonderland '  had  been  published  in  the 
seventeenth  century  it  would  have  been 
bracketed  with  Bunyan's  'Trial  of  Faithful' 
as  a  parody  on  the  State  prosecutions  of 
the  time.  We  fancy  that  if  '  The  Dong 
with  the  Luminous  Nose '  had  appeared  in 
the  same  period  everyone  would  have 
called,  it  a  dull  satire  on  Oliver  Cromwell. 
It  is  altogether  advisedly  that  we  quote 
chiefly  from  Mr.  Lear's  'Nonsense  Rhymes.' 
To  our  mind  he  is  both  chronologically  and 
essentially  the  father  of  nonsense ;  we  think 
him  superior  to  Lewis  Carroll.  In  one 
sense,  indeed,  Lewis  Carroll  has  a  great 
advantage.  We  know  what  Lewis  Carroll 
was  in  daily  life :  he  was  a  singularly 
serious  and  conventional  don,  universally 
respected,  but  very  much  of  a  pedant  and 
something  of  a  Philistine.  Thus  his  strange 
double  life  in  earth  and  in  dreamland 
emphasizes  the  idea  that  lies  at  the  back 
of  nonsense — the  idea  of  escape,  of  escape 


A  DEFENCE  OF  NONSENSE  45 

into  a  world  where  things  are  not  fixed 
horribly  in  an  eternal  appropriateness, 
where  apples  grow  on  pear-trees,  and  any- 
odd  man  you  meet  may  have  three  legs 
Lewis  Carroll,  living  one  life  in  which  he 
would  have  thundered  morally  against  any 
one  who  walked  on  the  wrong  plot  of  grass, 
and  another  life  in  which  he  would  cheer- 
fully call  the  sun  green  and  the  moon  blue, 
was,  by  his  very  divided  nature,  his  one 
foot  on  both  worlds,  a  perfect  type  of  the 
position  of  modern  nonsense.  His  Wonder- 
land is  a  country  populated  by  insane 
mathematicians.  We  feel  the  whole  is  an 
escape  into  a  world  of  masquerade  ;  we  feel 
that  if  we  could  pierce  their  disguises,  we 
might  discover  that  Humpty  Dumpty  and 
the  March  Hare  were  Professors  and 
Doctors  of  Divinity  enjoying  a  mental 
holiday.  This  sense  of  escape  is  certainly 
less  emphatic  in  Edward  Lear,  because  of 
the  completeness  of  his  citizenship  in  the 
world  of  unreason.  We  do  not  know  his 
prosaic  biography  as  we  know  Lewis 
Carroll's.  We  accept  him  as  a  purely 
fabulous  figure,  on  his  own  description  of 
himself : 

'  His  body  is  perfectly  spherical, 
He  weareth  a  runcible  hat.' 

While    Lewis    Carroll's    Wonderland    is 


46  THE  DEFENDANT 

purely  intellectual,  Lear  introduces  quite 
another  element  —  the  element  of  the 
poetical  and  even  emotional.  Carroll 
works  by  the  pure  reason,  but  this  is  not 
so  strong  a  contrast  ;  for,  after  all,  man- 
kind in  the  main  has  always  regarded 
reason  as  a  bit  of  a  joke.  Lear  introduces 
his  unmeaning  words  and  his  amorphous 
creatures  not  with  the  pomp  of  reason,  but 
with  the  romantic  prelude  of  rich  hues  and 
haunting  rhythms. 

'  Far  and  few,  far  and  few, 
Are  the  lands  where  the  Jumblies  live,' 

is  an  entirely  different  type  of  poetry  to 
that  exhibited  in  '  Jabberwocky.'  Carroll, 
with  a  sense  of  mathematical  neatness, 
makes  his  whole  poem  a  mosaic  of  new  and 
mysterious  words.  But  Edward  Lear,  with 
more  subtle  and  placid  effrontery,  is  always 
introducing  scraps  of  his  own  elvish  dialect 
into  the  middle  of  simple  and  rational 
statements,  until  we  are  almost  stunned 
into  admitting  that  we  know  what  they 
mean.  There  is  a  genial  ring  of  common- 
sense  about  such  lines  as, 

1  For  his  aunt  Jobiska  said  "Every  one  knows 
That  a  Pobble  is  better  without  his  toes," ' 

which  is  beyond  the  reach  of  Carroll.    The 


A  DEFENCE  OF  NONSENSE  47 

poet  seems  so  easy  on  the  matter  that  we 
are  almost  driven  to  pretend  that  we  see 
his  meaning,  that  we  know  the  peculiar 
difficulties  of  a  Pobble,  that  we  are  as  old 
travellers  in  the  '  Gromboolian  Plain '  as 
he  is. 

Our  claim  that  nonsense  is  a  new  litera- 
ture (we  might  almost  say  a  new  sense) 
would  be  quite  indefensible  if  nonsense 
were  nothing  more  than  a  mere  aesthetic 
fancy.  Nothing  sublimely  artistic  has 
ever  arisen  out  of  mere  art,  any  more  than 
anything  essentially  reasonable  has  ever 
arisen  out  of  the  pure  reason.  There  must 
always  be  a  rich  moral  soil  for  any  great 
aesthetic  growth.  The  principle  of  art  for 
art's  sake  is  a  very  good  principle  if  it 
means  that  there  is  a  vital  distinction 
between  the  earth  and  the  tree  that  has 
its  roots  in  the  earth  ;  but  it  is  a  very  bad 
principle  if  it  means  that  the  tree  could 
grow  just  as  well  with  its  roots  in  the  air. 
Every  great  literature  has  always  been 
allegorical — allegorical  of  some  view  of  the 
whole  universe.  The  '  Iliad '  is  only  great 
because  all  life  is  a  battle,  the  '  Odyssey ' 
because  all  life  is  a  journey,  the  Book  of 
Job  because  all  life  is  a  riddle.  There  is 
one  attitude  in  which  we  think  that  all 
existence    is    summed    up    in    the    word 


48  THE  DEFENDANT 

1  ghosts  ' ;  another,  and  somewhat  better 
one,  in  which  we  think  it  is  summed  up  in 
the  words  'A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream.' 
Even  the  vulgarest  melodrama  or  detective 
story  can  be  good  if  it  expresses  something 
of  the  delight  in  sinister  possibilities — the 
healthy  lust  for  darkness  and  terror  which 
may  come  on  us  any  night  in  walking 
down  a  dark  lane.  If,  therefore,  nonsense 
is  really  to  be  the  literature  of  the  future, 
it  must  have  its  own  version  of  the  Cosmos 
to  offer  ;  the  world  must  not  only  be  the 
tragic,  romantic,  and  religious,  it  must  be 
nonsensical  also.  And  here  we  fancy  that 
nonsense  will,  in  a  very  unexpected  way, 
come  to  the  aid  of  the  spiritual  view  of 
things.  Religion  has  for  centuries  been 
trying  to  make  men  exult  in  the  'wonders' 
of  creation,  but  it  has  forgotten  that  a 
thing  cannot  be  completely  wonderful  so 
long  as  it  remains  sensible.  So  long  as  we 
regard  a  tree  as  an  obvious  thing,  naturally 
and  reasonably  created  for  a  giraffe  to  eat, 
we  cannot  properly  wonder  at  it.  It  is 
when  we  consider  it  as  a  prodigious  wave 
of  the  living  soil  sprawling  up  to  the  skies 
for  no  reason  in  particular  that  we  take  off 
our  hats,  to  the  astonishment  of  the  park- 
keeper.  Everything  has  in  fact  another 
side  to  it,  like  the  moon,  the  patroness  of 


A  DEFENCE  OF  NONSENSE  49 

nonsense.  Viewed  from  that  other  side, 
a  bird  is  a  blossom  broken  loose  from  its 
chain  of  stalk,  a  man  a  quadruped  begging 
on  its  hind  legs,  a  house  a  gigantesque  hat 
to  cover  a  man  from  the  sun,  a  chair  an 
apparatus  of  four  wooden  legs  for  a  cripple 
with  only  two. 

This  is  the  side  of  things  which  tends 
most  truly  to  spiritual  wonder.  It  is 
significant  that  in  the  greatest  religious 
poem  existent,  the  Book  of  Job,  the 
argument  which  convinces  the  infidel  is 
not  (as  has  been  represented  by  the  merely 
rational  religionism  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury) a  picture  of  the  ordered  beneficence 
of  the  Creation ;  but,  on  the  contrary, 
a  picture  of  the  huge  and  undecipherable 
unreason  of  it.  '  Hast  Thou  sent  the  rain 
upon  the  desert  where  no  man  is  V  This 
simple  sense  of  wonder  at  the  shapes  of 
things,  and  at  their  exuberant  inde- 
pendence of  our  intellectual  standards  and 
our  trivial  definitions,  is  the  basis  of 
spirituality  as  it  is  the  basis  of  nonsense. 
Nonsense  and  faith  (strange  as  the  con- 
junction may  seem)  are  the  two  supreme 
symbolic  assertions  of  the  truth  that  to 
draw  out  the  soul  of  things  with  a  syllogism 
is  as  impossible  as  to  draw  out  Leviathan 
with   a   hook.     The  well-meaning   person 

4 


50  THE  DEFENDANT 

who,  by  merely  studying  the  logical  side 
of  things,  has  decided  that  '  faith  is  non- 
sense,' does  not  know  how  truly  he  speaks  ; 
later  it  may  come  back  to  him  in  the  form 
that  nonsense  is  faith. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PLANETS 

A  BOOK  has  at  one  time  come  under 
my  notice  called  '  Terra  Firma  :  the 
Earth  not  a  Planet.'  The  author  was  a 
Mr.  D.  Wardlaw  Scott,  and  he  quoted 
very  seriously  the  opinions  of  a  large 
number  of  other  persons,  of  whom  we 
have  never  heard,  but  who  are  evidently 
very  important.  Mr.  Beach  of  Southsea, 
for  example,  thinks  that  the  world  is 
flat ;  and  in  Southsea  perhaps  it  is.  It 
is  no  part  of  my  present  intention,  how- 
ever, to  follow  Mr.  Scott's  arguments  in 
detail.  On  the  lines  of  such  arguments 
it  may  be  shown  that  the  earth  is  flat, 
and,  for  the  matter  of  that,  that  it  is  tri- 
angular.    A  few  examples  will  suffice  : 

One  of  Mr.  Scott's  objections  was  that  if 
a  projectile  is  fired  from  a  moving  body 
there  is  a  difference  in  the  distance  to 
which  it  carries  according  to  the  direction 
in  which  it  is  sent.  But  as  in  practice 
there  is  not  the  slightest  difference  which- 
ever way  the  thing  is  done,  in  the  case  of 
the  earth  '  we  have  a  forcible  overthrow 
of  all  fancies  relative  to  the  motion  of  the 

4—2 


52  THE  DEFENDANT 

earth,  and  a  striking  proof  that  the  earth 
is  not  a  globe.' 

This  is  altogether  one  of  the  quaintest 
arguments  we  have  ever  seen.  It  never 
seems  to  occur  to  the  author,  among  other 
things,  that  when  the  firing  and  falling  of 
the  shot  all  take  place  upon  the  moving 
body,  there  is  nothing  whatever  to  compare 
them  with.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  of  course, 
a  shot  fired  at  an  elephant  does  actually 
often  travel  towards  the  marksman,  but 
much  slower  than  the  marksman  travels. 
Mr.  Scott  probably  would  not  like  to  con- 
template the  fact  that  the  elephant,  pro- 
perly speaking,  swings  round  and  hits  the 
bullet.  To  us  it  appears  full  of  a  rich 
cosmic  humour. 

I  will  only  give  one  other  example  of 
the  astronomical  proofs  : 

1  If  the  earth  were  a  globe,  the  distance 
round  the  surface,  say,  at  45  degrees  south 
latitude,  could  not  possibly  be  any  greater 
than  the  same  latitude  north  ;  but  since  it 
is  found  by  navigators  to  be  twice  the  dis- 
tance— to  say  the  least  of  it — or  double 
the  distance  it  ought  to  be  according  to 
the  globular  theory,  it  is  a  proof  that  the 
earth  is  not  a  globe.' 

This  sort  of  thing  reduces  my  mind  to 
a  pulp.  I  can  faintly  resist  when  a  man 
says  that  if  the  earth  were  a  globe  cats 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PLANETS  53 

would  not  have  four  legs ;  but  when  he 
says  that  if  the  earth  were  a  globe  cats 
would  not  have  five  legs  I  am  crushed. 

But,  as  I  have  indicated,  it  is  not  in 
the  scientific  aspect  of  this  remarkable 
theory  that  I  am  for  the  moment  inter- 
ested. It  is  rather  with  the  difference 
between  the  flat  and  the  round  worlds  as 
conceptions  in  art  and  imagination  that  I 
am  concerned.  It  is  a  very  remarkable 
thing  that  none  of  us  are  really  Coperni- 
cans  in  our  actual  outlook  upon  things. 
We  are  convinced  intellectually  that  we 
inhabit  a  small  provincial  planet,  but  we 
do  not  feel  in  the  least  suburban.  Men  of 
science  have  quarrelled  with  the  Bible 
because  it  is  not  based  upon  the  true 
astronomical  system,  but  it  is  certainly 
open  to  the  orthodox  to  say  that  if  it  had 
been  it  would  never  have  convinced  any- 
body. 

If  a  single  poem  or  a  single  story  were 
really  transfused  with  the  Copernican  idea, 
the  thing  would  be  a  nightmare.  Can  we 
think  of  a  solemn  scene  of  mountain  still- 
ness in  which  some  prophet  is  standing  in 
a  trance,  and  then  realize  that  the  whole 
scene  is  whizzing  round  like  a  zoetrope  at 
the  rate  of  nineteen  miles  a  second  ? 
Could  we  tolerate  the  notion  of  a  mighty 
King  delivering  a  sublime  fiat  and  then 


54  THE  DEFENDANT 

remember  that  for  all  practical  purposes 
he  is  hanging  head  downwards  in  space  ? 
A  strange  fable  might  be  written  of  a  man 
who  was  blessed  or  cursed  with  the  Coper- 
nican  eye,  and  saw  all  men  on  the  earth 
like  tintacks  clustering  round  a  magnet. 
It  would  be  singular  to  imagine  how  very 
different  the  speech  of  an  aggressive  egoist, 
announcing  the  independence  and  divinity 
of  man,  would  sound  if  he  were  seen  hang- 
ing on  to  the  planet  by  his  boot  soles. 

For,  despite  Mr.  Wardlaw  Scott's  horror 
at  the  Newtonian  astronomy  and  its  con- 
tradiction of  the  Bible,  the  whole  distinc- 
tion is  a  good  instance  of  the  difference 
between  letter  and  spirit ;  the  letter  of  the 
Old  Testament  is  opposed  to  the  conception 
of  the  solar  system,  but  the  spirit  has 
much  kinship  with  it.  The  writers  of  the 
Book  of  Genesis  had  no  theory  of  gravita- 
tion, which  to  the  normal  person  will 
appear  a  fact  of  as  much  importance  as 
that  they  had  no  umbrellas.  But  the 
theory  of  gravitation  has  a  curiously 
Hebrew  sentiment  in  it — a  sentiment  of 
combined  dependence  and  certainty,  a 
sense  of  grappling  unity,  by  which  all 
things  hang  upon  one  thread.  '  Thou  hast 
hanged  the  world  upon  nothing,'  said  the 
author  of  the  Book  of  Job,  and  in  that 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PLANETS  55 

sentence  wrote  the  whole  appalling  poetry 
of  modem  astronomy.  The  sense  of  the 
preciousness  and  fragility  of  the  universe, 
the  sense  of  being  in  the  hollow  of  a  hand, 
is  one  which  the  round  and  rolling  earth 
gives  in  its  most  thrilling  form.  Mr. 
Wardlaw  Scott's  flat  earth  would  be  the 
true  territory  for  a  comfortable  atheist. 
Nor  would  the  old  Jews  have  any  objec- 
tion to  being  as  much  upside  down  as 
right  way  up.  They  had  no  foolish  ideas 
about  the  dignity  of  man. 

It  would  be  an  interesting  speculation 
to  imagine  whether  the  world  will  ever 
develop  a  Copernican  poetry  and  a  Coper- 
nican  habit  of  fancy ;  whether  we  shall 
ever  speak  of  '  early  earth-turn  '  instead  of 
'  early  sunrise,'  and  speak  indifferently  of 
looking  up  at  the  daisies,  or  looking  down 
on  the  stars.  But  if  we  ever  do,  there  are 
really  a  large  number  of  big  and  fantastic 
facts  awaiting  us,  worthy  to  make  a  new 
mythology.  Mr.  Wardlaw  Scott,  for  ex- 
ample, with  genuine,  if  unconscious,  imagi- 
nation, says  that  according  to  astronomers, 
'  the  sea  is  a  vast  mountain  of  water  miles 
high.'  To  have  discovered  that  mountain 
of  moving  crystal,  in  which  the  fishes  build 
like  birds,  is  like  discovering  Atlantis  :  it 
is  enough  to  make  the  old  world  young 


56  THE  DEFENDANT 

again.  In  the  new  poetry  which  we  con- 
template, athletic  young  men  will  set  out 
sturdily  to  climb  up  the  face  of  the  sea. 
If  we  once  realize  all  this  earth  as  it  is,  we 
should  find  ourselves  in  a  land  of  miracles  : 
we  shall  discover  a  new  planet  at  the 
moment  that  we  discover  our  own.  Among 
all  the  strange  things  that  men  have 
forgotten,  the  most  universal  and  catas- 
trophic lapse  of  memory  is  that  by  which 
they  have  forgotten  that  they  are  living  on 
a  star. 

In  the  early  days  of  the  world,  the 
discovery  of  a  fact  of  natural  history  was 
immediately  followed  by  the  realization  of 
it  as  a  fact  of  poetry.  When  man  awoke 
from  the  long  fit  of  absent-mindedness 
which  is  called  the  automatic  animal  state, 
and  began  to  notice  the  queer  facts  that 
the  sky  was  blue  and  the  grass  green,  he 
immediately  began  to  use  those  facts 
symbolically.  Blue,  the  colour  of  the  sky, 
became  a  symbol  of  celestial  holiness ; 
green  passed  into  the  language  as  indicating 
a  freshness  verging  upon  unintelligence. 
If  we  had  the  good  fortune  to  live  in  a 
world  in  which  the  sky  was  green  and  the 
grass  blue,  the  symbolism  would  have  been 
different.  But  for  some  mysterious  reason 
this  habit  of  realizing  poetically  the  facts 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PLANETS  57 

of  science  has  ceased  abruptly  with  scien- 
tific progress,  and  all  the  confounding 
portents  preached  by  Galileo  and  Newton 
have  fallen  on  deaf  ears.  They  painted  a 
picture  of  the  universe  compared  with 
which  the  Apocalypse  with  its  falling  stars 
was  a  mere  idyll.  They  declared  that  we 
are  all  careering  through  space,  clinging  to 
a  cannon-ball,  and  the  poets  ignore  the 
matter  as  if  it  were  a  remark  about  the 
weather.  They  say  that  an  invisible  force 
holds  us  in  our  own  armchairs  while  the 
earth  hurtles  like  a  boomerang  ;  and  men 
still  go  back  to  dusty  records  to  prove  the 
mercy  of  God.  They  tell  us  that  Mr.  Scott's 
monstrous  vision  of  a  mountain  of  sea-water 
rising  in  a  solid  dome,  like  the  glass  moun- 
tain in  the  fairy-tale,  is  actually  a  fact,  and 
men  still  go  back  to  the  fairy-tale.  To  what 
towering  heights  of  poetic  imagery  might 
we  not  have  risen  if  only  the  poetizing  of 
natural  history  had  continued  and  man's 
fancy  had  played  with  the  planets  as 
naturally  as  it  once  played  with  the 
flowers  !  We  might  have  had  a  planetary 
patriotism,  in  which  the  green  leaf  should 
be  like  a  cockade,  and  the  sea  an  everlast- 
ing dance  of  drums.  We  might  have  been 
proud  of  what  our  star  has  wrought,  and 
worn  its  heraldry  haughtily  in  the  blind 


58  THE  DEFENDANT 

tournament  of  the  spheres.  All  this, 
indeed,  we  may  surely  do  yet ;  for  with  all 
the  multiplicity  of  knowledge  there  is  one 
thing  happily  that  no  man  knows :  whether 
the  world  is  old  or  young. 


A  DEFENCE  OF 
CHINA  SHEPHERDESSES 

THERE  are  some  things  of  which  the 
world  does  not  like  to  be  reminded, 
for  they  are  the  dead  loves  of  the  world. 
One  of  these  is  that  great  enthusiasm  for 
the  Arcadian  life  which,  however  much  it 
may  now  lie  open  to  the  sneers  of  realism, 
did,  beyond  all  question,  hold  sway  for  an 
enormous  period  of  the  world's  history, 
from  the  times  that  we  describe  as  ancient 
down  to  times  that  may  fairly  be  called 
recent.  The  conception  of  the  innocent 
and  hilarious  life  of  shepherds  and  shep- 
herdesses certainly  covered  and  absorbed 
the  time  of  Theocritus,  of  Virgil,  of  Catul- 
lus, of  Dante,  of  Cervantes,  of  Ariosto,  of 
Shakespeare,  and  of  Pope.  We  are  told 
that  the  gods  of  the  heathen  were  stone 
and  brass,  but  stone  and  brass  have  never 
endured  with  the  long  endurance  of  the 
China  Shepherdess.  The  Catholic  Church 
and  the  Ideal  Shepherd  are  indeed  almost 
the  only  things  that  have  bridged  the 
abyss  between  the  ancient  world  and  the 
modern.     Yet,  as  we  say,  the  world  does 


60  THE  DEFENDANT 

not  like  to  be  reminded  of  this  boyish  en- 
thusiasm. 

But  imagination,  the  function  of  the 
historian,  cannot  let  so  great  an  element 
alone.  By  the  cheap  revolutionary  it  is 
commonly  supposed  that  imagination  is  a 
merely  rebellious  thing,  that  it  has  its 
chief  function  in  devising  new  and  fantastic 
republics.  But  imagination  has  its  highest 
use  in  a  retrospective  realization.  The 
trumpet  of  imagination,  like  the  trumpet 
of  the  Resurrection,  calls  the  dead  out  of 
their  graves.  Imagination  sees  Delphi 
with  the  eyes  of  a  Greek,  Jerusalem  with 
the  eyes  of  a  Crusader,  Paris  with  the 
eyes  of  a  Jacobin,  and  Arcadia  with  the 
eyes  of  a  Euphuist.  The  prime  function 
of  imagination  is  to  see  our  whole  orderly 
system  of  life  as  a  pile  of  stratified  revolu- 
tions. In  spite  of  all  revolutionaries  it 
must  be  said  that  the  function  of  imagina- 
tion is  not  to  make  strange  things  settled, 
so  much  as  to  make  settled  things  strange  ; 
not  so  much  to  make  wonders  facts  as  to 
make  facts  wonders.  To  the  imaginative 
the  truisms  are  all  paradoxes,  since  they 
were  paradoxes  in  the  Stone  Age  ;  to  them 
the  ordinary  copy-book  blazes  with  blas- 
phemy. 

Let  us,  then,  consider  in  this  light  the 
old  pastoral  or  Arcadian  ideal.     But  first 


CHINA  SHEPHERDESSES  61 

certainly  one  thing  must  be  definitely 
recognised.  This  Arcadian  art  and  litera- 
ture is  a  lost  enthusiasm.  To  study  it  is 
like  fumbling  in  the  love-letters  of  a  dead 
man.  To  us  its  flowers  seem  as  tawdry 
as  cockades  ;  the  lambs  that  dance  to  the 
shepherd's  pipe  seem  to  dance  with  all  the 
artificiality  of  a  ballet.  Even  our  own 
prosaic  toil  seems  to  us  more  joyous  than 
that  holiday.  Where  its  ancient  exuber- 
ance passed  the  bounds  of  wisdom  and 
even  of  virtue,  its  caperings  seem  frozen 
into  the  stillness  of  an  antique  frieze.  In 
those  gray  old  pictures  a  bacchanal  seems 
as  dull  as  an  archdeacon.  Their  very  sins 
seem  colder  than  our  restraints. 

All  this  may  be  frankly  recognised  :  all 
the  barren  sentimentality  of  the  Arcadian 
ideal  and  all  its  insolent  optimism.  But 
when  all  is  said  and  done,  something  else 
remains. 

Through  ages  in  which  the  most  arrogant 
and  elaborate  ideals  of  power  and  civiliza- 
tion held  otherwise  undisputed  sway,  the 
ideal  of  the  perfect  and  healthy  peasant 
did  undoubtedly  represent  in  some  shape 
or  form  the  conception  that  there  was  a 
dignity  in  simplicity  and  a  dignity  in 
labour.  It  was  good  for  the  ancient  aristo- 
crat, even  if  he  could  not  attain  to  inno- 
cence  and   the  wisdom   of  the  earth,   to 


62  THE  DEFENDANT 

believe  that  these  things  were  the  secrets 
of  the  priesthood  of  the  poor.  It  was  good 
for  him  to  believe  that  even  if  heaven  was 
not  above  him,  heaven  was  below  him.  It 
was  well  that  he  should  have  amid  all  his 
flamboyant  triumphs  the  never  -  extin- 
guished sentiment  that  there  was  some- 
thing better  than  his  triumphs,  the  concep- 
tion that  '  there  remaineth  a  rest.' 

The  conception  of  the  Ideal  Shepherd 
seems  absurd  to  our  modern  ideas.  But, 
after  all,  it  was  perhaps  the  only  trade  of 
the  democracy  which  was  equalized  with 
the  trades  of  the  aristocracy  even  by  the 
aristocracy  itself.  The  shepherd  of  pastoral 
poetry  was,  without  doubt,  very  different 
from  the  shepherd  of  actual  fact.  Where 
one  innocently  piped  to  his  lambs,  the 
other  innocently  swore  at  them  ;  and  their 
divergence  in  intellect  and  personal  cleanli- 
ness was  immense.  But  the  difference 
between  the  ideal  shepherd  who  danced 
with  Amaryllis  and  the  real  shepherd  who 
thrashed  her  is  not  a  scrap  greater  than 
the  difference  between  the  ideal  soldier 
who  dies  to  capture  the  colours  and  the 
real  soldier  who  lives  to  clean  his  accoutre- 
ments, between  the  ideal  priest  who  is 
everlastingly  by  someone's  bed  and  the 
real  priest  who  is  as  glad  as  anyone  else  to 
get  to  his  own.     There  are  ideal  concep- 


CHINA  SHEPHERDESSES  63 

tions  and  real  men  in  every  calling  ;  yet 
there  are  few  who  object  to  the  ideal  con- 
ceptions, and  not  many,  after  all,  who 
object  to  the  real  men. 

The  fact,  then,  is  this  :  So  far  from  re- 
senting the  existence  in  art  and  literature 
of  an  ideal  shepherd,  I  genuinely  regret 
that  the  shepherd  is  the  only  democratic 
calling  that  has  ever  been  raised  to  the 
level  of  the  heroic  callings  conceived  by  an 
aristocratic  age.  So  far  from  objecting  to 
the  Ideal  Shepherd,  I  wish  there  were  an 
Ideal  Postman,  an  Ideal  Grocer,  and  an 
Ideal  Plumber.  It  is  undoubtedly  true 
that  we  should  laugh  at  the  idea  of  an 
Ideal  Postman  ;  it  is  true,  and  it  proves 
that  we  are  not  genuine  democrats. 

Undoubtedly  the  modern  grocer,  if  called 
upon  to  act  in  an  Arcadian  manner,  if 
desired  to  oblige  with  a  symbolic  dance 
expressive  of  the  delights  of  grocery,  or 
to  perform  on  some  simple  instrument 
while  his  assistants  skipped  around  him, 
would  be  embarrassed,  and  perhaps  even 
reluctant.  But  it  may  be  questioned 
whether  this  temporary  reluctance  of  the 
grocer  is  a  good  thing,  or  evidence  of  a 
good  condition  of  poetic  feeling  in  the 
grocery  business  as  a  whole.  There  cer- 
tainly should  be  an  ideal  image  of  health 
and  happiness  in  any  trade,  and  its  remote- 


64  THE  DEFENDANT 

ness  from  the  reality  is  not  the  only  im- 
portant question.  No  one  supposes  that 
the  mass  of  traditional  conceptions  of  duty 
and  glory  are  always  operative,  for  example, 
in  the  mind  of  a  soldier  or  a  doctor  ;  that 
the  Battle  of  Waterloo  actually  makes  a 
private  enjoy  pipeclaying  his  trousers,  or 
that  the  '  health  of  humanity '  softens  the 
momentary  phraseology  of  a  physician 
called  out  of  bed  at  two  o'clock  in  the 
morning.  But  although  no  ideal  obliterates 
the  ugly  drudgery  and  detail  of  any  call- 
ing, that  ideal  does,  in  the  case  of  the 
soldier  or  the  doctor,  exist  definitely  in  the 
background  and  makes  that  drudgery 
worth  while  as  a  whole.  It  is  a  serious 
calamity  that  no  such  ideal  exists  in  the 
case  of  the  vast  number  of  honourable 
trades  and  crafts  on  which  the  existence 
of  a  modern  city  depends.  It  is  a  pity 
that  current  thought  and  sentiment  offer 
nothing  corresponding  to  the  old  concep- 
tion of  patron  saints.  If  they  did  there 
would  be  a  Patron  Saint  of  Plumbers,  and 
this  would  alone  be  a  revolution,  for  it 
would  force  the  individual  craftsman  to 
believe  that  there  was  once  a  perfect  being 
who  did  actually  plumb. 

When  all  is  said  and  done,  then,  we 
think  it  much  open  to  question  whether 
the  world  has  not  lost  something  in  the 


CHINA  SHEPHERDESSES  65 

complete  disappearance  of  the  ideal  of  the 
happy  peasant.  It  is  foolish  enough  to 
suppose  that  the  rustic  went  about  all  over 
ribbons,  but  it  is  better  than  knowing  that 
he  goes  about  all  over  rags  and  being  in- 
different to  the  fact.  The  modern  realistic 
study  of  the  poor  does  in  reality  lead  the 
student  further  astray  than  the  old  idyllic 
notion.  For  we  cannot  get  the  chiaroscuro 
of  humble  life  so  long  as  its  virtues  seem 
to  us  as  gross  as  its  vices  and  its  joys  as 
sullen  as  its  sorrows.  Probably  at  the 
very  moment  that  we  can  see  nothing  but 
a  dull-faced  man  smoking  and  drinking 
heavily  with  his  friend  in  a  pot-house,  the 
man  himself  is  on  his  soul's  holiday, 
crowned  with  the  flowers  of  a  passionate 
idleness,  and  far  more  like  the  Happy 
Peasant  than  the  world  will  ever  know. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  USEFUL 
INFORMATION 

IT  is  natural  and  proper  enough  that  the 
masses  of  explosive  ammunition  stored 
up  in  detective  stories  and  the  replete  and 
solid  sweet-stuff  shops  which  are  called 
sentimental  novelettes  should  be  popular 
with  the  ordinary  customer.  It  is  not 
difficult  to  realize  that  all  of  us,  ignorant 
or  cultivated,  are  primarily  interested  in 
murder  and  love-making.  The  really  ex- 
traordinary thing  is  that  the  most  appal- 
ling fictions  are  not  actually  so  popular  as 
that  literature  which  deals  with  the  most 
undisputed  and  depressing  facts.  Men  are 
not  apparently  so  interested  in  murder  and 
love-making  as  they  are  in  the  number  of 
different  forms  of  latchkey  which  exist  in 
London  or  the  time  that  it  would  take  a 
grasshopper  to  jump  from  Cairo  to  the 
Cape.  The  enormous  mass  of  fatuous  and 
useless  truth  which  fills  the  most  widely- 
circulated  papers,  such  as  Tit-Bits,  Science 
Si/tings,  and  many  of  the  illustrated 
magazines,  is  certainly  one   of   the   most 


DEFENCE  OF  USEFUL  INFORMATION  67 

extraordinary  kinds  of  emotional  and 
mental  pabulum  on  which  man  ever  fed. 
It  is  almost  incredible  that  these  pre- 
posterous statistics  should  actually  be 
more  popular  than  the  most  blood-curdling 
mysteries  and  the  most  luxurious  de- 
bauches of  sentiment.  To  imagine  it  is 
like  imagining  the  humorous  passages  in 
Bradshaw's  Railway  Guide  read  aloud  on 
winter  evenings.  It  is  like  conceiving  a 
man  unable  to  put  down  an  advertisement 
of  Mother  Seigel's  Syrup  because  he 
wished  to  know  what  eventually  happened 
to  the  young  man  who  was  extremely  ill  at 
Edinburgh.  In  the  case  of  cheap  detective 
stories  and  cheap  novelettes,  we  can  most 
of  us  feel,  whatever  our  degree  of  educa- 
tion, that  it  might  be  possible  to  read  them 
if  we  gave  full  indulgence  to  a  lower  and 
more  facile  part  of  our  natures  ;  at  the 
worst  we  feel  that  we  might  enjoy  them  as 
we  might  enjoy  bull-baiting  or  getting 
drunk.  But  the  literature  of  information 
is  absolutely  mysterious  to  us.  We  can 
no  more  think  of  amusing  ourselves  with 
it  than  of  reading  whole  pages  of  a 
Surbiton  local  directory.  To  read  such 
things  would  not  be  a  piece  of  vulgar 
indulgence ;  it  would  be  a  highly  arduous 
and  meritorious  enterprise.  It  is  this  fact 
which  constitutes  a  profound  and  almost 

5—2 


68  THE  DEFENDANT 

unfathomable   interest    in   this   particular 
branch  of  popular  literature. 

Primarily,  at  least,  there  is  one  rather 
peculiar  thing  which  must  in  justice  be 
said  about  it.  The  readers  of  this  strange 
science  must  be  allowed  to  be,  upon  the 
whole,  as  disinterested  as  a  prophet  see- 
ing visions  or  a  child  reading  fairy-tales. 
Here,  again,  we  find,  as  we  so  often  do, 
that  whatever  view  of  this  matter  of 
popular  literature  we  can  trust,  we  can 
trust  least  of  all  the  comment  and  censure 
current  among  the  vulgar  educated.  The 
ordinary  version  of  the  ground  of  this 
popularity  for  information,  which  would  be 
given  by  a  person  of  greater  cultivation, 
would  be  that  common  men  are  chiefly 
interested  in  those  sordid  facts  that 
surround  them  on  every  side.  A  very 
small  degree  of  examination  will  show  us 
that  whatever  ground  there  is  for  the 
popularity  of  these  insane  encyclopaedias, 
it  cannot  be  the  ground  of  utility.  The 
version  of  life  given  by  a  penny  novelette 
may  be  very  moonstruck  and  unreliable, 
but  it  is  at  least  more  likely  to  contain 
facts  relevant  to  daily  life  than  compila- 
tions on  the  subject  of  the  number  of  cows' 
tails  that  would  reach  the  North  Pole. 
There  are  many  more  people  who  are  in 
love  than  there  are  people  who  have  any 


DEFENCE  OF  USEFUL  INFORMATION  69 

intention  of  counting  or  collecting  cows' 
tails.  It  is  evident  to  me  that  the  grounds 
of  this  widespread  madness  of  information 
for  information's  sake  must  be  sought  in 
other  and  deeper  parts  of  human  nature 
than  those  daily  needs  which  lie  so  near  the 
surface  that  even  social  philosophers  have 
discovered  them  somewhere  in  that  pro- 
found and  eternal  instinct  for  enthusiasm 
and  minding  other  people's  business  which 
made  great  popular  movements  like  the 
Crusades  or  the  Gordon  Riots. 

I  once  had  the  pleasure  of  knowing  a 
man  who  actually  talked  in  private  life 
after  the  manner  of  these  papers.  His 
conversation  consisted  of  fragmentary 
statements  about  height  and  weight  and 
depth  and  time  and  population,  and  his 
conversation  was  a  nightmare  of  dulness. 
During  the  shortest  pause  he  would  ask 
whether  his  interlocutors  were  aware  how 
many  tons  of  rust  were  scraped  every  year 
off  the  Menai  Bridge,  and  how  many  rival 
shops  Mr.  Whiteley  had  bought  up  since 
he  opened  his  business.  The  attitude  of 
his  acquaintances  towards  this  inex- 
haustible entertainer  varied  according  to 
his  presence  or  absence  between  indiffer- 
ence and  terror.  It  was  frightful  to  think 
of  a  man's  brain  being  stocked  with  such 
inexpressibly  profitless  treasures.     It  was 


70  THE  DEFENDANT 

like  visiting  some  imposing  British  Museum 
and  finding  its  galleries  and  glass  cases 
filled  with  specimens  of  London  mud,  of 
common  mortar,  of  broken  walking-sticks 
and  cheap  tobacco.  Years  afterwards  I 
discovered  that  this  intolerable  prosaic 
bore  had  been,  in  fact,  a  poet.  I  learnt 
that  every  item  of  this  multitudinous  in- 
formation was  totally  and  unblushingly 
untrue,  that  for  all  I  knew  he  had  made  it 
up  as  he  went  along ;  that  no  tons  of  rust 
are  scraped  off  the  Menai  Bridge,  and  that 
the  rival  tradesmen  and  Mr.  Whiteley 
were  creatures  of  the  poet's  brain.  In- 
stantly I  conceived  consuming  respect  for 
the  man  who  was  so  circumstantial,  so 
monotonous,  so  entirely  purposeless  a  liar. 
With  him  it  must  have  been  a  case  of  art 
for  art's  sake.  The  joke  sustained  so 
gravely  through  a  respected  lifetime  was 
of  that  order  of  joke  which  is  shared  with 
omniscience.  But  what  struck  me  more 
cogently  upon  reflection  was  the  fact  that 
these  immeasurable  trivialities,  which  had 
struck  me  as  utterly  vulgar  and  arid  when 
I  thought  they  were  true,  immediately 
became  picturesque  and  almost  brilliant 
when  I  thought  they  were  inventions  of 
the  human  fancy.  And  here,  as  it  seems 
to  me,  I  laid  my  finger  upon  a  fundamental 
quality    of    the    cultivated    class    which 


DEFENCE  OF  USEFUL  INFORMATION  71 

prevents  it,  and  will,  perhaps,  always 
prevent  it  from  seeing  with  the  eyes  of 
popular  imagination.  The  merely  educated 
can  scarcely  ever  be  brought  to  believe 
that  this  world  is  itself  an  interesting 
place.  When  they  look  at  a  work  of  art, 
good  or  bad,  they  expect  to  be  interested, 
but  when  they  look  at  a  newspaper  ad- 
vertisement or  a  group  in  the  street,  they 
do  not,  properly  and  literally  speaking, 
expect  to  be  interested.  But  to  common 
and  simple  people  this  world  is  a  work  of 
art,  though  it  is,  like  many  great  works 
of  art,  anonymous.  They  look  to  life  for 
interest  with  the  same  kind  of  cheerful 
and  uneradicable  assurance  with  which  we 
look  for  interest  at  a  comedy  for  which  we 
have  paid  money  at  the  door.  To  the  eyes 
of  the  ultimate  school  of  contemporary 
fastidiousness,  the  universe  is  indeed  an 
ill-drawn  and  over-coloured  picture,  the 
scrawlings  in  circles  of  a  baby  upon  the 
slate  of  night ;  its  starry  skies  are  a  vulgar 
pattern  which  they  would  not  have  for  a 
wallpaper,  its  flowers  and  fruits  have  a 
cockney  brilliancy,  like  the  holiday  hat  of 
a  flower-girl.  Hence,  degraded  by  art  to 
its  own  level,  they  have  lost  altogether 
that  primitive  and  typical  taste  of  man — 
the  taste  for  news.  By  this  essential  taste 
for  news,  I  mean  the  pleasure  in  hearing 


72  THE  DEFENDANT 

the  mere  fact  that  a  man  has  died  at  the 
age  of  110  in  South  Wales,  or  that  the 
horses  ran  away  at  a  funeral  in  San  Fran- 
cisco. Large  masses  of  the  early  faiths 
and  politics  of  the  world,  numbers  of  the 
miracles  and  heroic  anecdotes,  are  based 
primarily  upon  this  love  of  something  that 
has  just  happened,  this  divine  institution 
of  gossip.  When  Christianity  was  named 
the  good  news,  it  spread  rapidly,  not  only 
because  it  was  good,  but  also  because  it 
was  news.  So  it  is  that  if  any  of  us  have 
ever  spoken  to  a  navvy  in  a  train  about 
the  daily  paper,  we  have  generally  found 
the  navvy  interested,  not  in  those  struggles 
of  Parliaments  and  trades  unions  which 
sometimes  are,  and  are  always  supposed  to 
be,  for  his  benefit ;  but  in  the  fact  that  an 
unusually  large  whale  has  been  washed  up 
on  the  coast  of  Orkney,  or  that  some  lead- 
ing millionaire  like  Mr.  Harmsworth  is 
reported  to  break  a  hundred  pipes  a  year. 
The  educated  classes,  cloyed  and  demoral- 
ized with  the  mere  indulgence  of  art  and 
mood,  can  no  longer  understand  the  idle 
and  splendid  disinterestedness  of  the 
reader  of  Pearson's  Weekly.  He  still 
keeps  something  of  that  feeling  which 
should  be  the  birthright  of  men — the  feel- 
ing that  this  planet  is  like  a  new  house 
into  which  we  have  just  moved  our  bag- 


DEFENCE  OF  USEFUL  INFORMATION  73 

gage.  Any  detail  of  it  has  a  value,  and, 
with  a  truly  sportsmanlike  instinct,  the 
average  man  takes  most  pleasure  in  the 
details  which  are  most  complicated,  irrele- 
vant, and  at  once  difficult  and  useless  to 
discover.  Those  parts  of  the  newspaper 
which  announce  the  giant  gooseberry  and 
the  raining  frogs  are  really  the  modern 
representatives  of  the  popular  tendency 
which  produced  the  hydra  and  the  were- 
wolf and  the  dog-headed  men.  Folk  in 
the  Middle  Ages  were  not  interested  in  a 
dragon  or  a  glimpse  of  the  devil  because 
they  thought  that  it  was  a  beautiful  prose 
idyll,  but  because  they  thought  that  it 
had  really  just  been  seen.  It  was  not  like 
so  much  artistic  literature,  a  refuge  indi- 
cating the  dulness  of  the  world  :  it  was  an 
incident  pointedly  illustrating  the  fecund 
poetry  of  the  world. 

That  much  can  be  said,  and  is  said, 
against  the  literature  of  information,  I  do 
not  for  a  moment  deny.  It  is  shapeless,  it 
is  trivial,  it  may  give  an  unreal  air  of  know- 
ledge, it  unquestionably  lies  along  with 
the  rest  of  popular  literature  under  the 
general  indictment  that  it  may  spoil  the 
chance  of  better  work,  certainly  by  wasting 
time,  possibly  by  ruining  taste.  But  these 
obvious  objections  are  the  objections  which 
we  hear  so  persistently  from  everyone  that 


74  THE  DEFENDANT 

one  cannot  help  wondering  where  the 
papers  in  question  procure  their  myriads 
of  readers.  The  natural  necessity  and 
natural  good  underlying  such  crude  insti- 
tutions is  far  less  often  a  subject  of  specu- 
lation ;  yet  the  healthy  hungers  which 
lie  at  the  back  of  the  habits  of  modern 
democracy  are  surely  worthy  of  the  same 
sympathetic  study  that  we  give  to  the 
dogmas  of  the  fanatics  long  dethroned  and 
the  intrigues  of  commonwealths  long  ob- 
literated from  the  earth.  And  this  is  the 
base  and  consideration  which  I  have  to 
offer :  that  perhaps  the  taste  for  shreds 
and  patches  of  journalistic  science  and 
history  is  not,  as  is  continually  asserted, 
the  vulgar  and  senile  curiosity  of  a  people 
that  has  grown  old,  but  simply  the  babyish 
and  indiscriminate  curiosity  of  a  people 
still  young  and  entering  history  for  the 
first  time.  In  other  words,  I  suggest  that 
they  only  tell  each  other  in  magazines 
the  same  kind  of  stories  of  commonplace 
portents  and  conventional  eccentricities 
which,  in  any  case,  they  would  tell  each 
other  in  taverns.  Science  itself  is  only 
the  exaggeration  and  specialization  of  this 
thirst  for  useless  fact,  which  is  the  mark  of 
the  youth  of  man.  But  science  has  become 
strangely  separated  from  the  mere  news 
and  scandal  of  flowers  and  birds ;  men  have 


DEFENCE  OF  USEFUL  INFORMATION  75 

ceased  to  see  that  a  pterodactyl  was  as 
fresh  and  natural  as  a  flower,  that  a  flower 
is  as  monstrous  as  a  pterodactyl.  The  re- 
building of  this  bridge  between  science  and 
human  nature  is  one  of  the  greatest  needs 
of  mankind.  We  have  all  to  show  that 
before  we  go  on  to  any  visions  or  creations 
we  can  be  contented  with  a  planet  of 
miracles. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HERALDRY 

THE  modern  view  of  heraldry  is  pretty- 
accurately  represented  by  the  words 
of  the  famous  barrister  who,  after  cross- 
examining  for  some  time  a  venerable  digni- 
tary of  Heralds'  College,  summed  up  his 
results  in  the  remark  that  '  the  silly  old 
man  didn't  even  understand  his  own  silly 
old  trade.' 

Heraldry  properly  so  called  was,  of 
course,  a  wholly  limited  and  aristocratic 
thing,  but  the  remark  needs  a  kind  of  quali- 
fication not  commonly  realized.  In  a  sense 
there  was  a  plebeian  heraldry,  since  every 
shop  was,  like  every  castle,  distinguished  not 
by  a  name,  but  a  sign.  The  whole  system 
dates  from  a  time  when  picture-writing 
still  really  ruled  the  world.  In  those  days 
few  could  read  or  write ;  they  signed  their 
names  with  a  pictorial  symbol,  a  cross — and 
a  cross  is  a  great  improvement  on  most 
men's  names. 

Now,  there  is  something  to  be  said  for 
the  peculiar  influence  of  pictorial  symbols 
on  men's  minds.  All  letters,  we  learn, 
were    originally    pictorial    and    heraldic : 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HERALDRY         77 

thus  the  letter  A  is  the  portrait  of  an  ox, 
but  the  portrait  is  now  reproduced  in  so 
impressionist  a  manner  that  but  little  of 
the  rural  atmosphere  can  be  absorbed  by 
contemplating  it.  But  as  long  as  some 
pictorial  and  poetic  quality  remains  in  the 
symbol,  the  constant  use  of  it  must  do 
something  for  the  aesthetic  education  of 
those  employing  it.  Public-houses  are 
now  almost  the  only  shops  that  use  the 
ancient  signs,  and  the  mysterious  attrac- 
tion which  they  exercise  may  be  (by  the 
optimistic)  explained  in  this  manner. 
There  are  taverns  with  names  so  dream- 
like and  exquisite  that  even  Sir  Wilfrid 
Lawson  might  waver  on  the  threshold  for  a 
moment,  suffering  the  poet  to  struggle  with 
the  moralist.  So  it  was  with  the  heraldic 
images.  It  is  impossible  to  believe  that 
the  red  lion  of  Scotland  acted  upon  those 
employing  it  merely  as  a  naked  conveni- 
ence like  a  number  or  a  letter ;  it  is  im- 
possible to  believe  that  the  Kings  of  Scot- 
land would  have  cheerfully  accepted  the 
substitute  of  a  pig  or  a  frog.  There  are, 
as  we  say,  certain  real  advantages  in  pic- 
torial symbols,  and  one  of  them  is  that 
everything  that  is  pictorial  suggests,  with- 
out naming  or  defining.  There  is  a  road 
from  the  eye  to  the  heart  that  does  not  go 
through  the  intellect.    Men  do  not  quarrel 


78  THE  DEFENDANT 

about  the  meaning  of  sunsets  ;  they  never 
dispute  that  the  hawthorn  says  the  best 
and  wittiest  thing  about  the  spring. 

Thus  in  the  old  aristocratic  days  there 
existed  this  vast  pictorial  symbolism  of  all 
the  colours  and  degrees  of  aristocracy. 
When  the  great  trumpet  of  equality  was 
blown,  almost  immediately  afterwards  was 
made  one  of  the  greatest  blunders  in  the 
history  of  mankind.  For  all  this  pride 
and  vivacity,  all  these  towering  symbols 
and  flamboyant  colours,  should  have  been 
extended  to  mankind.  The  tobacconist 
should  have  had  a  crest,  and  the  cheese- 
monger a  war-cry.  The  grocer  who  sold 
margarine  as  butter  should  have  felt  that 
there  was  a  stain  on  the  escutcheon  of  the 
Higginses.  Instead  of  doing  this,  the 
democrats  made  the  appalling  mistake — a 
mistake  at  the  root  of  the  whole  modern 
malady — of  decreasing  the  human  magnifi- 
cence of  the  past  instead  of  increasing  it. 
They  did  not  say,  as  they  should  have 
done,  to  the  common  citizen,  '  You  are  as 
good  as  the  Duke  of  Norfolk,'  but  used  that 
meaner  democratic  formula,  '  The  Duke  of 
Norfolk  is  no  better  than  you  are.' 

For  it  cannot  be  denied  that  the  world 
lost  something  finally  and  most  unfortu- 
nately about  the  beginning  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.     In  former  times  the  mass 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HERALDRY         79 

of  the  people  was  conceived  as  mean  and 
commonplace,  but  only  as  comparatively 
mean  and  commonplace ;  they  were  dwarfed 
and  eclipsed  by  certain  high  stations  and 
splendid  callings.  But  with  the  Victorian 
era  came  a  principle  which  conceived  men 
not  as  comparatively,  but  as  positively, 
mean  and  commonplace.  A  man  of  any 
station  was  represented  as  being  by  nature 
a  dingy  and  trivial  person — a  person  born, 
as  it  were,  in  a  black  hat.  It  began  to  be 
thought  that  it  was  ridiculous  for  a  man 
to  wear  beautiful  garments,  instead  of  it 
being — as,  of  course,  it  is — ridiculous  for 
him  to  deliberately  wear  ugly  ones.  It 
was  considered  affected  for  a  man  to  speak 
bold  and  heroic  words,  whereas,  of  course, 
it  is  emotional  speech  which  is  natural, 
and  ordinary  civil  speech  which  is  affected. 
The  whole  relations  of  beauty  and  ugliness, 
of  dignity  and  ignominy  were  turned  upside 
down.  Beauty  became  an  extravagance, 
as  if  top-hats  and  umbrellas  were  not  the 
real  extravagance — a  landscape  from  the 
land  of  the  goblins.  Dignity  became  a 
form  of  foolery  and  shamelessness,  as  if 
the  very  essence  of  a  fool  were  not  a  lack 
of  dignity.  And  the  consequence  is  that 
it  is  practically  most  difficult  to  propose 
any  decoration  or  public  dignity  for  modern 
men  without  making  them  laugh.     They 


80  THE  DEFENDANT 

laugh  at  the  idea  of  carrying  crests  and 
coats-of-arms  instead  of  laughing  at  their 
own  boots  and  neckties.  We  are  forbidden 
to  say  that  tradesmen  should  have  a  poetry 
of  their  own,  although  there  is  nothing  so 
poetical  as  trade.  A  grocer  should  have  a 
coat-of-arms  worthy  of  his  strange  mer- 
chandise gathered  from  distant  and  fan- 
tastic lands ;  a  postman  should  have  a 
coat-of-arms  capable  of  expressing  the 
strange  honour  and  responsibility  of  the 
man  who  carries  men's  souls  in  a  bag  ;  the 
chemist  should  have  a  coat-of-arms  sym- 
bolizing something  of  the  mysteries  of  the 
house  of  healing,  the  cavern  of  a  merciful 
witchcraft. 

There  were  in  the  French  Revolution  a 
class  of  people  at  whom  everybody  laughed, 
and  at  whom  it  was  probably  difficult,  as 
a  practical  matter,  to  refrain  from  laugh- 
ing. They  attempted  to  erect,  by  means 
of  huge  wooden  statues  and  brand-new 
festivals,  the  most  extraordinary  new  reli- 
gions. They  adored  the  Goddess  of  Reason, 
who  would  appear,  even  when  the  fullest 
allowance  has  been  made  for  their  many 
virtues,  to  be  the  deity  who  had  least 
smiled  upon  them.  But  these  capering 
maniacs,  disowned  alike  by  the  old  world 
and  the  new,  were  men  who  had  seen  a 
great   truth   unknown   alike   to  the   new 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HERALDRY         81 

world  and  the  old.  They  had  seen  the 
thing  that  was  hidden  from  the  wise  and 
understanding,  from  the  whole  modern 
democratic  civilization  down  to  the  present 
time.  They  realized  that  democracy  must 
have  a  heraldry,  that  it  must  have  a  proud 
and  high-coloured  pageantry,  if  it  is  to 
keep  always  before  its  own  mind  its  own 
sublime  mission.  Unfortunately  for  this 
ideal,  the  world  has  in  this  matter  followed 
English  democracy  rather  than  French ; 
and  those  who  look  back  to  the  nineteenth 
century  will  assuredly  look  back  to  it  as 
we  look  back  to  the  reign  of  the  Puritans, 
as  the  time  of  black  coats  and  black 
tempers.  From  the  strange  life  the  men 
of  that  time  led,  they  might  be  assisting 
at  the  funeral  of  liberty  instead  of  at  its 
christening.  The  moment  we  really  believe 
in  democracy,  it  will  begin  to  blossom,  as 
aristocracy  blossomed,  into  symbolic  colours 
and  shapes.  We  shall  never  make  any- 
thing of  democracy  until  we  make  fools 
of  ourselves.  For  if  a  man  really  cannot 
make  a  fool  of  himself,  we  may  be  quite 
certain  that  the  effort  is  superfluous. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  UGLY  THINGS 

THERE  are  some  people  who  state  that 
the  exterior,  sex,  or  physique  of 
another  person  is  indifferent  to  them,  that 
they  care  only  for  the  communion  of  mind 
with  mind  ;  but  these  people  need  not 
detain  us.  There  are  some  statements 
that  no  one  ever  thinks  of  believing,  how- 
ever often  they  are  made. 

But  while  nothing  in  this  world  would 
persuade  us  that  a  great  friend  of  Mr. 
Forbes  Robertson,  let  us  say,  would  ex- 
perience no  surprise  or  discomfort  at  seeing 
him  enter  the  room  in  the  bodily  form  of 
Mr.  Chaplin,  there  is  a  confusion  con- 
stantly made  between  being  attracted  by 
exterior,  which  is  natural  and  universal, 
and  being  attracted  by  what  is  called 
physical  beauty,  which  is  not  entirely 
natural  and  not  in  the  least  universal.  Or 
rather,  to  speak  more  strictly,  the  con- 
ception of  physical  beauty  has  been  nar- 
rowed to  mean  a  certain  kind  of  physical 
beauty  which  no  more  exhausts  the  possi- 
bilities of  external  attractiveness  than  the 
respectability  of  a   Clapham   builder   ex- 


A  DEFENCE  OF  UGLY  THINGS      83 

hausts  the  possibilities  of  moral  attractive- 
ness. 

The  tyrants  and  deceivers  of  mankind 
in  this  matter  have  been  the  Greeks.  All 
their  splendid  work  for  civilization  ought 
not  to  have  wholly  blinded  us  to  the  fact 
of  their  great  and  terrible  sin  against  the 
variety  of  life.  It  is  a  remarkable  fact 
that  while  the  Jews  have  long  ago  been 
rebelled  against  and  accused  of  blighting 
the  world  with  a  stringent  and  one-sided 
ethical  standard,  nobody  has  noticed  that 
the  Greeks  have  committed  us  to  an 
infinitely  more  horrible  asceticism  —  an 
asceticism  of  the  fancy,  a  worship  of  one 
aesthetic  type  alone.  Jewish  severity  had 
at  least  common -sense  as  its  basis  ;  it 
recognised  that  men  lived  in  a  world  of 
fact,  and  that  if  a  man  married  within  the 
degrees  of  blood  certain  consequences 
might  follow.  But  they  did  not  starve 
their  instinct  for  contrasts  and  combina- 
tions ;  their  prophets  gave  two  wings  to 
the  ox  and  any  number  of  eyes  to  the 
cherubim  with  all  the  riotous  ingenuity  of 
Lewis  Carroll.  But  the  Greeks  carried 
their  police  regulation  into  elfland ;  they 
vetoed  not  the  actual  adulteries  of  the 
earth  but  the  wild  weddings  of  ideas,  and 
forbade  the  banns  of  thought. 

It  is  extraordinary  to  watch  the  gradual 

6—2 


84  THE  DEFENDANT 

emasculation  of  the  monsters  of  Greek  myth 
under  the  pestilent  influence  of  the  Apollo 
Belvedere.  The  chimaera  was  a  creature 
of  whom  any  healthy-minded  people  would 
have  been  proud ;  but  when  we  see  it  in 
Greek  pictures  we  feel  inclined  to  tie  a 
ribbon  round  its  neck  and  give  it  a  saucer 
of  milk.  Who  ever  feels  that  the  giants 
in  Greek  art  and  poetry  were  really  big — 
big  as  some  folk-lore  giants  have  been  ? 
In  some  Scandinavian  story  a  hero  walks 
for  miles  along  a  mountain  ridge,  which 
eventually  turns  out  to  be  the  bridge  of 
the  giant's  nose.  That  is  what  we  should 
call,  with  a  calm  conscience,  a  large  giant. 
But  this  earthquake  fancy  terrified  the 
Greeks,  and  their  terror  has  terrified  all 
mankind  out  of  their  natural  love  of  size, 
vitality,  variety,  energy,  ugliness.  Nature 
intended  every  human  face,  so  long  as  it 
was  forcible,  individual,  and  expressive,  to 
be  regarded  as  distinct  from  all  others,  as 
a  poplar  is  distinct  from  an  oak,  and  an 
apple-tree  from  a  willow.  But  what  the 
Dutch  gardeners  did  for  trees  the  Greeks 
did  for  the  human  form  ;  they  lopped 
away  its  living  and  sprawling  features  to 
give  it  a  certain  academic  shape ;  they 
hacked  off  noses  and  pared  down  chins 
with  a  ghastly  horticultural  calm.  And 
they  have  really  succeeded   so   far   as  to 


A  DEFENCE  OF  UGLY  THINGS      85 

make  us  call  some  of  the  most  powerful 
and  endearing  faces  ugly,  and  some  of  the 
most  silly  and  repulsive  faces  beautiful. 
This  disgraceful  via  media,  this  pitiful 
sense  of  dignity,  has  bitten  far  deeper  into 
the  soul  of  modern  civilization  than  the 
external  and  practical  Puritanism  of  Israel. 
The  Jew  at  the  worst  told  a  man  to  dance 
in  fetters ;  the  Greek  put  an  exquisite 
vase  upon  his  head  and  told  him  not  to 
move. 

Scripture  says  that  one  star  differeth 
from  another  in  glory,  and  the  same  con- 
ception applies  to  noses.  To  insist  that 
one  type  of  face  is  ugly  because  it  differs 
from  that  of  the  Venus  of  Milo  is  to  look 
at  it  entirely  in  a  misleading  light.  It  is 
strange  that  we  should  resent  people  differ- 
ing from  ourselves  ;  we  should  resent 
much  more  violently  their  resembling 
ourselves.  This  principle  has  made  a 
sufficient  hash  of  literary  criticism,  in 
which  it  is  always  the  custom  to  complain 
of  the  lack  of  sound  logic  in  a  fairy  tale, 
and  the  entire  absence  of  true  oratorical 
power  in  a  three-act  farce.  But  to  call 
another  man's  face  ugly  because  it  power- 
fully expresses  another  man's  soul  is  like 
complaining  that  a  cabbage  has  not  two 
legs.  If  we  did  so,  the  only  course  for  the 
cabbage  would  be  to  point  out  with  severity, 


86  THE  DEFENDANT 

but  with  some  show  of  truth,  that  we  were 
not  a  beautiful  green  all  over. 

But  this  frigid  theory  of  the  beautiful 
has  not  succeeded  in  conquering  the  art 
of  the  world,  except  in  name.  In  some 
quarters,  indeed,  it  has  never  held  sway. 
A.  glance  at  Chinese  dragons  or  Japanese 
gods  will  show  how  independent  are 
Orientals  of  the  conventional  idea  of  facial 
and  bodily  regularity,  and  how  keen  and 
fiery  is  their  enjoyment  of  real  beauty,  of 
goggle  eyes,  of  sprawling  claws,  of  gaping 
mouths  and  writhing  coils.  In  the  Middle 
Ages  men  broke  away  from  the  Greek 
standard  of  beauty,  and  lifted  up  in  adora- 
tion to  heaven  great  towers,  which  seemed 
alive  with  dancing  apes  and  devils.  In 
the  full  summer  of  technical  artistic  per- 
fection the  revolt  was  carried  to  its  real 
consummation  in  the  study  of  the  faces  of 
men.  Rembrandt  declared  the  sane  and 
manly  gospel  that  a  man  was  dignified, 
not  when  he  was  like  a  Greek  god,  but 
when  he  had  a  strong,  square  nose  like  a 
cudgel,  a  boldly-blocked  head  like  a  helmet, 
and  a  jaw  like  a  steel  trap. 

This  branch  of  art  is  commonly  dis- 
missed as  the  grotesque.  We  have  never 
been  able  to  understand  why  it  should  be 
humiliating  to  be  laughable,  since  it  is 
giving   an   elevated    artistic    pleasure    to 


A  DEFENCE  OF  UGLY  THINGS      87 

others.  If  a  gentleman  who  saw  us  in  the 
street  were  suddenly  to  burst  into  tears  at 
the  mere  thought  of  our  existence,  it  might 
be  considered  disquieting  and  uncompli- 
mentary ;  but  laughter  is  not  uncompli- 
mentary. In  truth,  however,  the  phrase 
1  grotesque  '  is  a  misleading  description 
of  ugliness  in  art.  It  does  not  follow  that 
either  the  Chinese  dragons  or  the  Gothic 
gargoyles  or  the  goblinish  old  women  of 
Rembrandt  were  in  the  least  intended  to 
be  comic.  Their  extravagance  was  not 
the  extravagance  of  satire,  but  simply  the 
extravagance  of  vitality  ;  and  here  lies  the 
whole  key  of  the  place  of  ugliness  in 
aesthetics.  We  like  to  see  a  crag  jut  out 
in  shameless  decision  from  the  cliff,  we  like 
to  see  the  red  pines  stand  up  hardily  upon 
a  high  cliff,  we  like  to  see  a  chasm  cloven 
from  end  to  end  of  a  mountain.  With 
equally  noble  enthusiasm  we  like  to  see 
a  nose  jut  out  decisively,  we  like  to  see 
the  red  hair  of  a  friend  stand  up  hardily 
in  bristles  upon  his  head,  we  like  to  see 
his  mouth  broad  and  clean  cut  like  the 
mountain  crevasse.  At  least  some  of  us 
like  all  this  ;  it  is  not  a  question  of  humour. 
We  do  not  burst  with  amusement  at  the 
first  sight  of  the  pines  or  the  chasm ;  but 
we  like  them  because  they  are  expressive 
of  the  dramatic   stillness  of  Nature,  her 


88  THE  DEFENDANT 

bold  experiments,  her  definite  departures, 
her  fearlessness  and  savage  pride  in  her 
children.  The  moment  we  have  snapped 
the  spell  of  conventional  beauty,  there  are 
a  million  beautiful  faces  waiting  for  us 
everywhere,  just  as  there  are  a  million 
beautiful  spirits. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  FAECE 

I  HAVE  never  been  able  to  understand 
why  certain  forms  of  art  should  be 
marked  off  as  something  debased  and 
trivial.  A  comedy  is  spoken  of  as  'de- 
generating into  farce';  it  would  be  fair 
criticism  to  speak  of  it  '  changing  into 
farce ' ;  but  as  for  degenerating  into  farce, 
we  might  equally  reasonably  speak  of  it 
as  degenerating  into  tragedy.  Again,  a 
story  is  spoken  of  as  '  melodramatic,'  and 
the  phrase,  queerly  enough,  is  not  meant 
as  a  compliment.  To  speak  of  something 
as  'pantomimic'  or  'sensational'  is  inno- 
cently supposed  to  be  biting,  Heaven 
knows  why,  for  all  works  of  art  are  sensa- 
tions, and  a  good  pantomime  (now  extinct) 
is  one  of  the  pleasantest  sensations  of  all. 
'  This  stuff  is  fit  for  a  detective  story,'  is 
often  said,  as  who  should  say,  '  This  stuff  is 
fit  for  an  epic.' 

Whatever  may  be  the  rights  and  wrongs 
of  this  mode  of  classification,  there  can  be 
no  doubt  about  one  most  practical  and 
disastrous  effect  of  it.  These  lighter  or 
wilder  forms  of  art,  having  no  standard  set 


90  THE  DEFENDANT 

up  for  them,  no  gust  of  generous  artistic 
pride  to  lift  them  up,  do  actually  tend  to 
become  as  bad  as  they  are  supposed  to  be. 
Neglected  children  of  the  great  mother,  they 
grow  up  in  darkness,  dirty  and  unlettered, 
and  when  they  are  right  they  are  right 
almost  by  accident,  because  of  the  blood  in 
their  veins.  The  common  detective  story 
of  mystery  and  murder  seems  to  the  in- 
telligent reader  to  be  little  except  a  strange 
glimpse  of  a  planet  peopled  by  congenital 
idiots,  who  cannot  find  the  end  of  their  own 
noses  or  the  character  of  their  own  wives. 
The  common  pantomime  seems  like  some 
horrible  satiric  picture  of  a  world  without 
cause  or  effect,  a  mass  of  'jarring  atoms,'  a 
prolonged  mental  torture  of  irrelevancy. 
The  ordinary  farce  seems  a  world  of  almost 
piteous  vulgarity,  where  a  half-witted  and 
stunted  creature  is  afraid  when  his  wife 
comes  home,  and  amused  when  she  sits 
down  on  the  doorstep.  All  this  is,  in  a  sense, 
true,  but  it  is  the  fault  of  nothing  in  heaven 
or  earth  except  the  attitude  and  the  phrases 
quoted  at  the  beginning  of  this  article. 
We  have  no  doubt  in  the  world  that,  if  the 
other  forms  of  art  had  been  equally  despised, 
they  would  have  been  equally  despicable. 
If  people  had  spoken  of  '  sonnets '  with  the 
same  accent  with  which  they  speak  of 
1  music-hall  songs,'  a  sonnet  would   have 


A  DEFENCE  OF  FARCE  91 

been  a  thing  so  fearful  and  wonderful 
that  we  almost  regret  we  cannot  have  a 
specimen ;  a  rowdy  sonnet  is  a  thing  to 
dream  about.  If  people  had  said  that  epics 
were  only  fit  for  children  and  nursemaids, 
'  Paradise  Lost'  might  have  been  an  average 
pantomime :  it  might  have  been  called 
'  Harlequin  Satan,  or  How  Adam  'Ad  'em.' 
For  who  would  trouble  to  bring  to  perfec- 
tion a  work  in  which  even  perfection  is 
grotesque  ?  "Why  should  Shakespeare 
write  '  Othello '  if  even  his  triumph  con- 
sisted in  the  eulogy,  '  Mr.  Shakespeare  is 
fit  for  something  better  than  writing 
trag-edies '  ? 

The  case  of  farce,  and  its  wilder  embodi- 
ment in  harlequinade,  is  especially  impor- 
tant. That  these  high  and  legitimate 
forms  of  art,  glorified  by  Aristophanes  and 
Moliere,  have  sunk  into  such  contempt  may 
be  due  to  many  causes  :  I  myself  have  little 
doubt  that  it  is  due  to  the  astonishing  and 
ludicrous  lack  of  belief  in  hope  and  hilarity 
which  marks  modern  aesthetics,  to  such  an 
extent  that  it  has  spread  even  to  the 
revolutionists  (once  the  hopeful  section  of 
men),  so  that  even  those  who  ask  us  to 
fling  the  stars  into  the  sea  are  not  quite  sure 
that  they  will  be  any  better  there  than 
they  were  before.  Every  form  of  literary 
art  must  be  a  symbol  of  some  phase  of  the 


92  THE  DEFENDANT 

human  spirit ;  but  whereas  the  phase  is,  in 
human  life,  sufficiently  convincing  in  itself, 
in  art  it  must  have  a  certain  pungency  and 
neatness  of  form,  to  compensate  for  its  lack 
of  reality.  Thus  any  set  of  young  people 
round  a  tea-table  may  have  all  the  comedy 
emotions  of  '  Much  Ado  about  Nothing '  or 
'  Northanger  Abbey,'  but  if  their  actual 
conversation  were  reported,  it  would  pos- 
sibly not  be  a  worthy  addition  to  litera- 
ture. An  old  man  sitting  by  his  fire  may 
have  all  the  desolate  grandeur  of  Lear  or 
Pere  Goriot,  but  if  he  comes  into  literature 
he  must  do  something  besides  sit  by  the 
fire.  The  artistic  justification,  then,  of 
farce  and  pantomime  must  consist  in  the 
emotions  of  life  which  correspond  to  them. 
And  these  emotions  are  to  an  incredible 
extent  crushed  out  by  the  modern  insistence 
on  the  painful  side  of  life  only.  Pain,  it  is 
said,  is  the  dominant  element  of  life ;  but 
this  is  true  only  in  a  very  special  sense.  If 
pain  were  for  one  single  instant  literally 
the  dominant  element  in  life,  every  man 
would  be  found  hanging  dead  from  his  own 
bed-post  by  the  morning.  Pain,  as  the 
black  and  catastrophic  thing,  attracts  the 
youthful  artist,  just  as  the  schoolboy  draws 
devils  and  skeletons  and  men  hanging. 
But  joy  is  a  far  more  elusive  and  elvish 
matter,  since  it  is  our  reason  for  existing, 


A  DEFENCE  OF  FARCE  93 

and  a  very  feminine  reason ;  it  mingles 
with  every  breath  we  draw  and  every 
cup  of  tea  we  drink.  The  literature  of 
joy  is  infinitely  more  difficult,  more  rare 
and  more  triumphant  than  the  black  and 
white  literature  of  pain.  And  of  all  the 
varied  forms  of  the  literature  of  joy,  the 
form  most  truly  worthy  of  moral  reverence 
and  artistic  ambition  is  the  form  called 
1  farce  ' — or  its  wilder  shape  in  pantomime. 
To  the  quietest  human  being,  seated  in 
the  quietest  house,  there  will  sometimes 
come  a  sudden  and  unmeaning  hunger  for 
the  possibilities  or  impossibilities  of  things ; 
he  will  abruptly  wonder  whether  the  tea- 
pot may  not  suddenly  begin  to  pour  out 
honey  or  sea- water,  the  clock  to  point  to 
all  hours  of  the  day  at  once,  the  candle  to 
burn  green  or  crimson,  the  door  to  open 
upon  a  lake  or  a  potato-field  instead  of  a 
London  street.  Upon  anyone  who  feels 
this  nameless  anarchism  there  rests  for  the 
time  being  the  abiding  spirit  of  pantomime. 
Of  the  clown  who  cuts  the  policeman  in 
two  it  may  be  said  (with  no  darker  mean- 
ing) that  he  realizes  one  of  our  visions. 
And  it  may  be  noted  here  that  this 
internal  quality  in  pantomime  is  perfectly 
symbolized  and  preserved  by  that  common- 
place or  cockney  landscape  and  architec- 
ture which  characterizes   pantomime  and 


94  THE  DEFENDANT 

farce.  If  the  whole  affair  happened  in 
some  alien  atmosphere,  if  a  pear-tree  began 
to  grow  apples  or  a  river  to  run  with  wine 
in  some  strange  fairyland,  the  effect  would 
be  quite  different.  The  streets  and  shops 
and  door-knockers  of  the  harlequinade, 
which  to  the  vulgar  aesthete  make  it 
seem  commonplace,  are  in  truth  the  very- 
essence  of  the  aesthetic  departure.  It  must 
be  an  actual  modern  door  which  opens  and 
shuts,  constantly  disclosing  different  in- 
teriors ;  it  must  be  a  real  baker  whose 
loaves  fly  up  into  the  air  without  his 
touching  them,  or  else  the  whole  internal 
excitement  of  this  elvish  invasion  of  civili- 
zation, this  abrupt  entrance  of  Puck  into 
Pimlico,  is  lost.  Some  day,  perhaps,  when 
the  present  narrow  phase  of  aesthetics  has 
ceased  to  monopolize  the  name,  the  glory 
of  a  farcical  art  may  become  fashionable. 
Long  after  men  have  ceased  to  drape  their 
houses  in  green  and  gray  and  to  adorn 
them  with  Japanese  vases,  an  aesthete  may 
build  a  house  on  pantomime  principles,  in 
which  all  the  doors  shall  have  their  bells 
and  knockers  on  the  inside,  all  the  stair- 
cases be  constructed  to  vanish  on  the 
pressing  of  a  button,  and  all  the  dinners 
(humorous  dinners  in  themselves)  come 
up  cooked  through  a  trapdoor.  We  are 
very  sure,  at  least,  that  it  is  as  reasonable 


A  DEFENCE  OF  FARCE  95 

to  regulate  one's  life  and  lodgings  by  this 
kind  of  art  as  by  any  other. 

The  whole  of  this  view  of  farce  and 
pantomime  may  seem  insane  to  us  ;  but  we 
fear  that  it  is  we  who  are  insane.  Nothing 
in  this  strange  age  of  transition  is  so 
depressing  as  its  merriment.  All  the 
most  brilliant  men  of  the  day  when  they 
set  about  the  writing  of  comic  literature 
do  it  under  one  destructive  fallacy  and 
disadvantage:  the  notion  that  comic  litera- 
ture is  in  some  sort  of  way  superficial. 
They  give  us  little  knick-knacks  of  the 
brittleness  of  which  they  positively  boast, 
although  two  thousand  years  have  beaten 
as  vainly  upon  the  follies  of  the  '  Frogs ' 
as  on  the  wisdom  of  the  '  Republic.'  It  is 
all  a  mean  shame  of  joy.  When  we  come 
out  from  a  performance  of  the  '  Midsummer 
Night's  Dream '  we  feel  as  near  to  the  stars 
as  when  we  come  out  from  '  King  Lear.' 
For  the  joy  of  these  works  is  older  than 
sorrow,  their  extravagance  is  saner  than 
wisdom,  their  love  is  stronger  than  death. 

The  old  masters  of  a  healthy  madness, 
Aristophanes  or  Rabelais  or  Shakespeare, 
doubtless  had  many  brushes  with  the 
precisians  or  ascetics  of  their  day,  but  we 
cannot  but  feel  that  for  honest  severity 
and  consistent  self- maceration  they  would 
always    have    had    respect.      But    what 


96  THE  DEFENDANT 

abysses  of  scorn,  inconceivable  to  any 
modern,  would  they  have  reserved  for  an 
aesthetic  type  and  movement  which  vio- 
lated morality  and  did  not  even  find 
pleasure,  which  outraged  sanity  and  could 
not  attain  to  exuberance,  which  contented 
itself  with  the  fool's  cap  without  the  bells  ! 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HUMILITY 

THE  act  of  defending  any  of  the  cardinal 
virtues  has  to-day  all  the  exhilara- 
tion of  a  vice.  Moral  truisms  have  been 
so  much  disputed  that  they  have  begun 
to  sparkle  like  so  many  brilliant  paradoxes. 
And  especially  (in  this  age  of  egoistic 
idealism)  there  is  about  one  who  defends 
humility  something  inexpressibly  rakish. 

It  is  no  part  of  my  intention  to  defend 
humility  on  practical  grounds.  Practical 
grounds  are  uninteresting,  and,  moreover, 
on  practical  grounds  the  case  for  humility 
is  overwhelming.  We  all  know  that  the 
'  divine  glory  of  the  ego  '  is  socially  a  great 
nuisance ;  we  all  do  actually  value  our 
friends  for  modesty,  freshness,  and  sim- 
plicity of  heart.  Whatever  may  be  the 
reason,  we  all  do  warmly  respect  humility 
— in  other  people. 

But  the  matter  must  go  deeper  than 
this.  If  the  grounds  of  humility  are  found 
only  in  social  convenience,  they  may  be 
quite  trivial  and  temporary.  The  egoists 
may  be  the  martyrs  of  a  nobler  dispensa- 
tion, agonizing  for  a  more  arduous  ideal. 

7 


98  THE  DEFENDANT 

To  judge  from  the  comparative  lack  of  ease 
in  their  social  manner,  this  seems  a  reason- 
able suggestion. 

There  is  one  thing  that  must  be  seen  at 
the  outset  of  the  study  of  humility  from 
an  intrinsic  and  eternal  point  of  view. 
The  new  philosophy  of  self-esteem  and 
self-assertion  declares  that  humility  is  a 
vice.  If  it  be  so,  it  is  quite  clear  that  it 
is  one  of  those  vices  which  are  an  integral 
part  of  original  sin.  It  follows  with  the 
precision  of  clockwork  every  one  of  the 
great  joys  of  life.  No  one,  for  example, 
was  ever  in  love  without  indulging  in  a 
positive  debauch  of  humility.  All  full- 
blooded  and  natural  people,  such  as  school- 
boys, enjoy  humility  the  moment  they  attain 
hero-worship.  Humility,  again,  is  said 
both  by  its  upholders  and  opponents  to  be 
the  peculiar  growth  of  Christianity.  The 
real  and  obvious  reason  of  this  is  often 
missed.  The  pagans  insisted  upon  self- 
assertion  because  it  was  the  essence  of 
their  creed  that  the  gods,  though  strong 
and  just,  were  mystic,  capricious,  and  even 
indifferent.  But  the  essence  of  Christianity 
was  in  a  literal  sense  the  New  Testament 
— a  covenant  with  God  which  opened  to 
men  a  clear  deliverance.  They  thought 
themselves  secure  ;  they  claimed  palaces 
of  pearl  and  silver  under  the  oath  and  seal 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HUMILITY  99 

of  the  Omnipotent ;  they  believed  them- 
selves rich  with  an  irrevocable  benediction 
which  set  them  above  the  stars  ;  and  im- 
mediately they  discovered  humility.  It 
was  only  another  example  of  the  same 
immutable  paradox.  It  is  always  the 
secure  who  are  humble. 

This  particular  instance  survives  in  the 
evangelical  revivalists  of  the  street.  They 
are  irritating  enough,  but  no  one  who  has 
really  studied  them  can  deny  that  the 
irritation  is  occasioned  by  these  two 
things,  an  irritating  hilarity  and  an  irritat- 
ing humility.  This  combination  of  joy  and 
self-prostration  is  a  great  deal  too  uni- 
versal to  be  ignored.  If  humility  has  been 
discredited  as  a  virtue  at  the  present  day, 
it  is  not  wholly  irrelevant  to  remark  that 
this  discredit  has  arisen  at  the  same  time 
as  a  great  collapse  of  joy  in  current  litera- 
ture and  philosophy.  Men  have  revived 
the  splendour  of  Greek  self-assertion  at 
the  same  time  that  they  have  revived  the 
bitterness  of  Greek  pessimism.  A  litera- 
ture has  arisen  which  commands  us  all  to 
arrogate  to  ourselves  the  liberty  of  self- 
sufficing  deities  at  the  same  time  that  it 
exhibits  us  to  ourselves  as  dingy  maniacs 
who  ought  to  be  chained  up  like  dogs.  It 
is  certainly  a  curious  state  of  things  alto- 
gether.    When  we  are  genuinely  happy, 

7—2 


100  THE  DEFENDANT 

we  think  we  are  unworthy  of  happiness. 
But  when  we  are  demanding  a  divine 
emancipation  we  seem  to  be  perfectly 
certain  that  we  are  unworthy  of  anything. 
The  only  explanation  of  the  matter  must 
be  found  in  the  conviction  that  humility 
has  infinitely  deeper  roots  than  any  modern 
men  suppose ;  that  it  is  a  metaphysical 
and,  one  might  almost  say,  a  mathematical 
virtue.  Probably  this  can  best  be  tested 
by  a  study  of  those  who  frankly  disregard 
humility  and  assert  the  supreme  duty  of 
perfecting  and  expressing  one's  self.  These 
people  tend,  by  a  perfectly  natural  process, 
to  bring  their  own  great  human  gifts  of 
culture,  intellect,  or  moral  power  to  a 
great  perfection,  successively  shutting  out 
everything  that  they  feel  to  be  lower  than 
themselves.  Now  shutting  out  things  is 
all  very  well,  but  it  has  one  simple 
corollary — that  from  everything  that  we 
shut  out  we  are  ourselves  shut  out.  When 
we  shut  our  door  on  the  wind,  it  would  be 
equally  true  to  say  that  the  wind  shuts 
its  door  on  us.  Whatever  virtues  a  tri- 
umphant egoism  really  leads  to,  no  one 
can  reasonably  pretend  that  it  leads  to 
knowledge.  Turning  a  beggar  from  the 
door  may  be  right  enough,  but  pretending 
to  know  all  the  stories  the  beggar  might 
have  narrated  is  pure  nonsense ;  and  this 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HUMILITY        101 

is  practically  the  claim  of  the  egoism  which 
thinks  that  self-assertion  can  obtain  know- 
ledge. A  beetle  may  or  may  not  be  in- 
ferior to  a  man  —  the  matter  awaits 
demonstration ;  but  if  he  were  inferior  by 
ten  thousand  fathoms,  the  fact  remains 
that  there  is  probably  a  beetle  view  of 
things  of  which  a  man  is  entirely  ignorant. 
If  he  wishes  to  conceive  that  point  of  view, 
he  will  scarcely  reach  it  by  persistently 
revelling  in  the  fact  that  he  is  not  a 
beetle.  The  most  brilliant  exponent  of 
the  egoistic  school,  Nietszche,  with  deadly 
and  honourable  logic,  admitted  that  the 
philosophy  of  self-satisfaction  led  to  look- 
ing down  upon  the  weak,  the  cowardly, 
and  the  ignorant.  Looking  down  on 
things  may  be  a  delightful  experience, 
only  there  is  nothing,  from  a  mountain  to 
a  cabbage,  that  is  really  seen  when  it  is 
seen  from  a  balloon.  The  philosopher  of 
the  ego  sees  everything,  no  doubt,  from 
a  high  and  rarified  heaven  ;  only  he  sees 
everything  foreshortened  or  deformed. 

Now  if  we  imagine  that  a  man  wished 
truly,  as  far  as  possible,  to  see  everything 
as  it  was,  he  would  certainly  proceed  on 
a  different  principle.  He  would  seek  to 
divest  himself  for  a  time  of  those  personal 
peculiarities  which  tend  to  divide  him  from 
the  thing  he  studies.     It  is   as  difficult, 


102  THE  DEFENDANT 

for  example,  for  a  man  to  examine  a  fish 
without  developing  a  certain  vanity  in 
possessing  a  pair  of  legs,  as  if  they  were 
the  latest  article  of  personal  adornment. 
But  if  a  fish  is  to  be  approximately  under- 
stood, this  physiological  dandyism  must  be 
overcome.  The  earnest  student  of  fish 
morality  will,  spiritually  speaking,  chop 
off  his  legs.  And  similarly  the  student 
of  birds  will  eliminate  his  arms  ;  the  frog- 
lover  will  with  one  stroke  of  the  imagina- 
tion remove  all  his  teeth,  and  the  spirit 
wishing  to  enter  into  all  the  hopes  and 
fears  of  jelly-fish  will  simplify  his  personal 
appearance  to  a  really  alarming  extent. 
It  would  appear,  therefore,  that  this  great 
body  of  ours  and  all  its  natural  instincts, 
of  which  we  are  proud,  and  justly  proud, 
is  rather  an  encumbrance  at  the  moment 
when  we  attempt  to  appreciate  things  as 
they  should  be  appreciated.  We  do 
actually  go  through  a  process  of  mental 
asceticism,  a  castration  of  the  entire  being, 
when  we  wish  to  feel  the  abounding  good 
in  all  things.  It  is  good  for  us  at  certain 
times  that  ourselves  should  be  like  a  mere 
window — as  clear,  as  luminous,  and  as 
invisible. 

In  a  very  entertaining  work,  over  which 
we  have  roared  in  childhood,  it  is  stated 
that  a  point  has  no  parts  and  no  mag- 


A  DEFENCE  OF  HUMILITY        103 

nitude.  Humility  is  the  luxurious  art  of 
reducing  ourselves  to  a  point,  not  to  a 
small  thing  or  a  large  one,  but  to  a  thing 
with  no  size  at  all,  so  that  to  it  all  the 
cosmic  things  are  what  they  really  are — 
of  immeasurable  stature.  That  the  trees 
are  high  and  the  grasses  short  is  a  mere 
accident  of  our  own  foot-rules  and  our 
own  stature.  But  to  the  spirit  which  has 
stripped  off  for  a  moment  its  own  idle 
temporal  standards  the  grass  is  an  ever- 
lasting forest,  with  dragons  for  denizens ; 
the  stones  of  the  road  are  as  incredible 
mountains  piled  one  upon  the  other ;  the 
dandelions  are  like  gigantic  bonfires  illu- 
minating the  lands  around  ;  and  the  heath- 
bells  on  their  stalks  are  like  planets  hung 
in  heaven  each  higher  than  the  other. 
Between  one  stake  of  a  paling  and  another 
there  are  new  and  terrible  landscapes ; 
here  a  desert,  with  nothing  but  one  mis- 
shapen rock  ;  here  a  miraculous  forest,  of 
which  all  the  trees  flower  above  the  head 
with  the  hues  of  sunset ;  here,  again,  a 
sea  full  of  monsters  that  Dante  would  not 
have  dared  to  dream.  These  are  the 
visions  of  him  who,  like  the  child  in  the 
fairy  tales,  is  not  afraid  to  become  small. 
Meanwhile,  the  sage  whose  faith  is  in 
magnitude  and  ambition  is,  like  a  giant, 
becoming   larger   and   larger,  which   only 


104  THE  DEFENDANT 

means  that  the  stars  are  becoming  smaller 
and  smaller.  World  after  world  falls  from 
him  into  insignificance  ;  the  whole  passion- 
ate and  intricate  life  of  common  things 
becomes  as  lost  to  him  as  is  the  life  of  the 
infusoria  to  a  man  without  a  microscope. 
He  rises  always  through  desolate  eternities. 
He  may  find  new  systems,  and  forget 
them  ;  he  may  discover  fresh  universes, 
and  learn  to  despise  them.  But  the 
towering  and  tropical  vision  of  things  as 
they  really  are — the  gigantic  daisies,  the 
heaven- consuming  dandelions,  the  great 
Odyssey  of  strange- coloured  oceans  and 
strange -shaped  trees,  of  dust  like  the 
wreck  of  temples,  and  thistledown  like  the 
ruin  of  stars — all  this  colossal  vision  shall 
perish  with  the  last  of  the  humble. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SLANG 

THE  aristocrats  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury have  destroyed  entirely  their 
one  solitary  utility.  It  is  their  business 
to  be  flaunting  and  arrogant ;  but  they 
flaunt  unobtrusively,  and  their  attempts 
at  arrogance  are  depressing.  Their  chief 
duty  hitherto  has  been  the  development  of 
variety,  vivacity,  and  fulness  of  life  ;  oli- 
garchy was  the  world's  first  experiment  in 
liberty.  But  now  they  have  adopted  the 
opposite  ideal  of  'good  form,'  which  may 
be  defined  as  Puritanism  without  religion. 
Good  form  has  sent  them  all  into  black 
like  the  stroke  of  a  funeral  bell.  They 
engage,  like  Mr.  Gilbert's  curates,  in  a  war 
of  mildness,  a  positive  competition  of  ob- 
scurity. In  old  times  the  lords  of  the 
earth  sought  above  all  things  to  be  dis- 
tinguished from  each  other ;  with  that 
object  they  erected  outrageous  images  on 
their  helmets  and  painted  preposterous 
colours  on  their  shields.  They  wished  to 
make  it  entirely  clear  that  a  Norfolk  was 
as  different,  say,  from  an  Argyll  as  a  white 
lion  from  a  black  pig.     But  to-day  their 


106  THE  DEFENDANT 

ideal  is  precisely  the  opposite  one,  and  if 
a  Norfolk  and  an  Argyll  were  dressed  so 
much  alike  that  they  were  mistaken  for 
each  other  they  would  both  go  home 
dancing  with  joy. 

The  consequences  of  this  are  inevitable. 
The  aristocracy  must  lose  their  function 
of  standing  to  the  world  for  the  idea  of 
variety,  experiment,  and  colour,  and  we 
must  find  these  things  in  some  other  class. 
To  ask  whether  we  shall  find  them  in  the 
middle  class  would  be  to  jest  upon  sacred 
matters.  The  only  conclusion,  therefore, 
is  that  it  is  to  certain  sections  of  the  lower 
class,  chiefly,  for  example,  to  omnibus-con- 
ductors, with  their  rich  and  rococo  mode  of 
thought,  that  we  must  look  for  guidance 
towards  liberty  and  light. 

The  one  stream  of  poetry  which  is  con- 
tinually flowing  is  slang.  Every  day  a 
nameless  poet  weaves  some  fairy  tracery 
of  popular  language.  It  may  be  said  that 
the  fashionable  world  talks  slang  as  much 
as  the  democratic ;  this  is  true,  and  it 
strongly  supports  the  view  under  considera- 
tion. Nothing  is  more  startling  than  the 
contrast  between  the  heavy,  formal,  lifeless 
slang  of  the  man-about-town  and  the  light, 
living,  and  flexible  slang  of  the  coster. 
The  talk  of  the  upper  strata  of  the  educated 
classes  is  about  the  most  shapeless,  aimless, 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SLANG  107 

and  hopeless  literary  product  that  the 
world  has  ever  seen.  Clearly  in  this, 
again,  the  upper  classes  have  degenerated. 
We  have  ample  evidence  that  the  old 
leaders  of  feudal  war  could  speak  on  occa- 
sion with  a  certain  natural  symbolism  and 
eloquence  that  they  had  not  gained  from 
books.  When  Cyrano  de  Bergerac,  in 
Rostand's  play,  throws  doubts  on  the 
reality  of  Christian's  dulness  and  lack  of 
culture,  the  latter  replies  : 

'Bah!  on  trouve  des  mots  quand  on  monte  a  l'assaut; 
Oui,  j'ai  un  certain  esprit  facile  et  militaire  ;' 

and  these  two  lines  sum  up  a  truth  about 
the  old  oligarchs.  They  could  not  write 
three  legible  letters,  but  they  could  some- 
times speak  literature.  Douglas,  when  he 
hurled  the  heart  of  Bruce  in  front  of  him 
in  his  last  battle,  cried  out,  '  Pass  first, 
great  heart,  as  thou  wert  ever  wont.'  A 
Spanish  nobleman,  when  commanded  by 
the  King  to  receive  a  high-placed  and 
notorious  traitor,  said  :  '  I  will  receive  him 
in  all  obedience,  and  burn  down  my  house 
afterwards.'  This  is  literature  without 
culture  ;  it  is  the  speech  of  men  convinced 
that  they  have  to  assert  proudly  the  poetry 
of  life. 

Anyone,  however,  who  should  seek  for 
such  pearls  in  the  conversation  of  a  young 


108  THE  DEFENDANT 

man  of  modern  Belgravia  would  have  much 
sorrow  in  his  life.  It  is  not  only  impossible 
for  aristocrats  to  assert  proudly  the  poetry 
of  life  ;  it  is  more  impossible  for  them  than 
for  anyone  else.  It  is  positively  con- 
sidered vulgar  for  a  nobleman  to  boast  of 
his  ancient  name,  which  is,  when  one 
comes  to  think  of  it,  the  only  rational 
object  of  his  existence.  If  a  man  in  the 
street  proclaimed,  with  rude  feudal  rhetoric, 
that  he  was  the  Earl  of  Doncaster,  he 
would  be  arrested  as  a  lunatic  ;  but  if  it 
were  discovered  that  he  really  was  the 
Earl  of  Doncaster,  he  would  simply  be  cut 
as  a  cad.  No  poetical  prose  must  be  ex- 
pected from  Earls  as  a  class.  The  fashion- 
able slang  is  hardly  even  a  language  ;  it  is 
like  the  formless  cries  of  animals,  dimly 
indicating  certain  broad,  well-understood 
states  of  mind.  'Bored,'  'cut  up,'  'jolly,' 
'  rotten,'  and  so  on,  are  like  the  words  of 
some  tribe  of  savages  whose  vocabulary 
has  only  twenty  of  them.  If  a  man  of 
fashion  wished  to  protest  against  some 
solecism  in  another  man  of  fashion,  his 
utterance  would  be  a  mere  string  of  set 
phrases,  as  lifeless  as  a  string  of  dead  fish. 
But  an  omnibus  conductor  (being  filled 
with  the  Muse)  would  burst  out  into  a 
solid  literary  effort  :  '  You're  a  gen'leman, 
aren't  yer  .  .  .  yer  boots  is  a  lot  brighter 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SLANG  109 

than  yer  'ed  .  .  .  there's  precious  little  of 
yer,  and  that's'  clothes  .  .  .  that's  right, 
put  yer  cigar  in  yer  mouth  'cos  I  can't  see 
yer  be'ind  it  .  .  .  take  it  out  again,  do 
yer  !  you're  young  for  smokin',  but  I've 
sent  for  yer  mother.  .  .  .  Goin'  ?  oh,  don't 
run  away  :  I  won't  'arm  yer.  I've  got  a 
good  'art,  I  'ave.  ..."  Down  with  croolty 
to  animals,"  I  say,'  and  so  on.  It  is  evident 
that  this  mode  of  speech  is  not  only 
literary,  but  literary  in  a  very  ornate  and 
almost  artificial  sense.  Keats  never  put 
into  a  sonnet  so  many  remote  metaphors 
as  a  coster  puts  into  a  curse ;  his  speech  is 
one  long  allegory,  like  Spenser's  '  Faerie 
Queen.' 

I  do  not  imagine  that  it  is  necessary  to 
demonstrate  that  this  poetic  allusiveness  is 
the  characteristic  of  true  slang.  Such  an 
expression  as  '  Keep  your  hair  on '  is  posi- 
tively Meredithian  in  its  perverse  and 
mysterious  manner  of  expressing  an  idea. 
The  Americans  have  a  well-known  expres- 
sion about  '  swelled-head  '  as  a  description 
of  self-approval,  and  the  other  day  I  heard 
a  remarkable  fantasia  upon  this  air.  An 
American  said  that  after  the  Chinese  War 
the  Japanese  wanted  '  to  put  on  their  hats 
with  a  shoe-horn.'  This  is  a  monument  of 
the  true  nature  of  slang,  which  consists  in 
getting  further  and  further  away  from  the 


110  THE  DEFENDANT 

original  conception,  in  treating  it  more  and 
more  as  an  assumption.  It  is  rather  like 
the  literary  doctrine  of  the  Symbolists. 

The  real  reason  of  this  great  develop- 
ment of  eloquence  among  the  lower  orders 
again  brings  us  back  to  the  case  of  the 
aristocracy  in  earlier  times.  The  lower 
classes  live  in  a  state  of  war,  a  war  of 
words.  Their  readiness  is  the  product  of 
the  same  fiery  individualism  as  the  readi- 
ness of  the  old  fighting  oligarchs.  Any 
cabman  has  to  be  ready  with  his  tongue, 
as  any  gentleman  of  the  last  century  had 
to  be  ready  with  his  sword.  It  is  unfortu- 
nate that  the  poetry  which  is  developed 
by  this  process  should  be  purely  a  gro- 
tesque poetry.  But  as  the  higher  orders 
of  society  have  entirely  abdicated  their 
right  to  speak  with  a  heroic  eloquence,  it 
is  no  wonder  that  the  language  should 
develop  by  itself  in  the  direction  of  a 
rowdy  eloquence.  The  essential  point  is 
that  somebody  must  be  at  work  adding 
new  symbols  and  new  circumlocutions  to  a 
language. 

All  slang  is  metaphor,  and  all  metaphor 
is  poetry.  If  we  paused  for  a  moment  to 
examine  the  cheapest  cant  phrases  that 
pass  our  lips  every  day,  we  should  find  that 
they  were  as  rich  and  suggestive  as  so 
many  sonnets.     To  take  a  single  instance  : 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SLANG  111 

we  speak  of  a  man  in  English  social  rela- 
tions '  breaking  the  ice.'  If  this  were  ex- 
panded into  a  sonnet,  we  should  have 
before  us  a  dark  and  sublime  picture  of  an 
ocean  of  everlasting  ice,  the  sombre  and 
baffling  mirror  of  the  Northern  nature, 
over  which  men  walked  and  danced  and 
skated  easily,  but  under  which  the  living 
waters  roared  and  toiled  fathoms  below. 
The  world  of  slang  is  a  kind  of  topsy- 
turveydom  of  poetry,  full  of  blue  moons 
and  white  elephants,  of  men  losing  their 
heads,  and  men  whose  tongues  run  away 
with  them — a  whole  chaos  of  fairy  tales. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  BABY- WORSHIP 

rf^HE  two  facts  which  attract  almost 
JL  every  normal  person  to  children 
are,  first,  that  they  are  very  serious, 
and,  secondly,  that  they  are  in  conse- 
quence very  happy.  They  are  jolly  with 
the  completeness  which  is  possible  only 
in  the  absence  of  humour.  The  most  un- 
fathomable schools  and  sages  have  never 
attained  to  the  gravity  which  dwells  in 
the  eyes  of  a  baby  of  three  months  old. 
It  is  the  gravity  of  astonishment  at  the 
universe,  and  astonishment  at  the  universe 
is  not  mysticism,  but  a  transcendent  com- 
mon-sense. The  fascination  of  children 
lies  in  this  :  that  with  each  of  them  all 
things  are  remade,  and  the  universe  is 
put  again  upon  its  trial.  As  we  walk  the 
streets  and  see  below  us  those  delightful 
bulbous  heads,  three  times  too  big  for  the 
body,  which  mark  these  human  mush- 
rooms, we  ought  always  primarily  to  re- 
member that  within  every  one  of  these 
heads  there  is  a  new  universe,  as  new  as 
it  was  on  the  seventh  day  of  creation.  In 
each  of  those  orbs  there  is  a  new  system 


A  DEFENCE  OF  BABY-WORSHIP   113 

of  stars,    new   grass,    new   cities,    a    new 
sea. 

There  is  always  in  the  healthy  mind 
an  obscure  prompting  that  religion  teaches 
us  rather  to  dig  than  to  climb  ;  that  if  we 
could  once  understand  the  common  clay  of 
earth  we  should  understand  everything. 
Similarly,  we  have  the  sentiment  that  if 
we  could  destroy  custom  at  a  blow  and 
see  the  stars  as  a  child  sees  them,  we 
should  need  no  other  apocalypse.  This  is 
the  great  truth  which  has  always  lain 
at  the  back  of  baby-worship,  and  which 
will  support  it  to  the  end.  Maturity, 
with  its  endless  energies  and  aspirations, 
may  easily  be  convinced  that  it  will  find 
new  things  to  appreciate  ;  but  it  will 
never  be  convinced,  at  bottom,  that  it 
has  properly  appreciated  what  it  has  got. 
We  may  scale  the  heavens  and  find  new 
stars  innumerable,  but  there  is  still  the 
new  star  we  have  not  found — that  on 
which  we  were  born. 

But  the  influence  of  children  goes  further 
than  its  first  trifling  effort  of  remaking 
heaven  and  earth.  It  forces  us  actually 
to  remodel  our  conduct  in  accordance  with 
this  revolutionary  theory  of  the  marvellous- 
ness  of  all  things.  We  do  (even  when  we 
are  perfectly  simple  or  ignorant) — we  do 
actually  treat  talking  in  children  as  mar- 

8 


114  THE  DEFENDANT 

vellous,  walking  in  children  as  marvellous, 
common  intelligence  in  children  as  mar- 
vellous. The  cynical  philosopher  fancies 
he  has  a  victory  in  this  matter — that  he 
can  laugh  when  he  shows  that  the  words 
or  antics  of  the  child,  so  much  admired  by 
its  worshippers,  are  common  enough.  The 
fact  is  that  this  is  precisely  where  baby- 
worship  is  so  profoundly  right.  Any 
words  and  any  antics  in  a  lump  of  clay  are 
wonderful,  the  child's  words  and  antics  are 
wonderful,  and  it  is  only  fair  to  say  that 
the  philosopher's  words  and  antics  are 
equally  wonderful. 

The  truth  is  that  it  is  our  attitude  to- 
wards children  that  is  right,  and  our 
attitude  towards  grown-up  people  that  is 
wrong.  Our  attitude  towards  our  equals 
in  age  consists  in  a  servile  solemnity,  over- 
lying a  considerable  degree  of  indiffer- 
ence or  disdain.  Our  attitude  towards 
children  consists  in  a  condescending  in- 
dulgence, overlying  an  unfathomable  re- 
spect. We  bow  to  grown  people,  take 
off  our  hats  to  them,  refrain  from  con- 
tradicting them  flatly,  but  we  do  not  ap- 
preciate them  properly.  We  make  puppets 
of  children,  lecture  them,  pull  their  hair, 
and  reverence,  love,  and  fear  them.  When 
we  reverence  anything  in  the  mature,  it  is 
their  virtues  or  their  wisdom,  and  this  is 


A  DEFENCE  OF  BABY- WORSHIP  115 

an   easy  matter.     But  we   reverence   the 
faults  and  follies  of  children. 

We  should  probably  come  considerably 
nearer  to  the  true  conception   of  things   if 
we   treated   all   grown-up   persons,  of  all 
titles  and  types,  with  precisely  that  dark 
affection  and  dazed  respect  with  which  we 
treat  the  infantile  limitations.    A  child  has 
a   difficulty   in   achieving   the    miracle   of 
speech,  consequently  we  find  his  blunders 
almost  as  marvellous  as  his  accuracy.     If 
we  only  adopted  the  same  attitude  towards 
Premiers  and  Chancellors  of  the  Exchequer, 
if  we  genially  encouraged  their  stammer- 
ing  and    delightful    attempts    at    human 
speech,  we  should  be  in  a  far  more  wise 
and  tolerant  temper.     A  child  has  a  knack 
of  making  experiments  in  life,   generally 
healthy  in  motive,  but  often  intolerable  in 
a   domestic   commonwealth.       If  we   only 
treated    all    commercial    buccaneers    and 
bumptious  tyrants  on  the   same  terms,  if 
we  gently  chided  their  brutalities  as  rather 
quaint  mistakes  in  the  conduct  of  life,  if 
we   simply   told   them    that    they   would 
'  understand  when   they   were   older,'   we 
should  probably  be  adopting  the  best  and 
most  crushing  attitude  towards  the  weak- 
nesses of  humanity.      In  our  relations  to 
children   we    prove   that   the   paradox   is 
entirely  true,  that  it  is  possible  to  combine 

8—2 


116  THE  DEFENDANT 

an  amnesty  that  verges  on  contempt  with 
a  worship  that  verges  upon  terror.  We 
forgive  children  with  the  same  kind  of 
blasphemous  gentleness  with  which  Omar 
Khayyam  forgave  the  Omnipotent. 

The  essential  rectitude  of  our  view  of 
children  lies  in  the  fact  that  we  feel  them 
and  their  ways  to  be  supernatural  while, 
for  some  mysterious  reason,  we  do  not  feel 
ourselves  or  our  own  ways  to  be  super- 
natural. The  very  smallness  of  children 
makes  it  possible  to  regard  them  as  marvels ; 
we  seem  to  be  dealing  with  a  new  race, 
only  to  be  seen  through  a  microscope.  I 
doubt  if  anyone  of  any  tenderness  or 
imagination  can  see  the  hand  of  a  child 
and  not  be  a  little  frightened  of  it.  It 
is  awful  to  think  of  the  essential  human 
energy  moving  so  tiny  a  thing ;  it  is  like 
imagining  that  human  nature  could  live  in 
the  wing  of  a  butterfly  or  the  leaf  of  a  tree. 
When  we  look  upon  lives  so  human  and 
yet  so  small,  we  feel  as  if  we  ourselves 
were  enlarged  to  an  embarrassing  bigness 
of  stature.  We  feel  the  same  kind  of 
obligation  to  these  creatures  that  a  deity 
might  feel  if  he  had  created  something 
that  he  could  not  understand. 

But  the  humorous  look  of  children  is 
perhaps  the  most  endearing  of  all  the 
bonds   that    hold    the    Cosmos    together. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  BABY- WORSHIP   117 

Their  top-heavy  dignity  is  more  touching 
than  any  humility ;  their  solemnity  gives 
us  more  hope  for  all  things  than  a  thousand 
carnivals  of  optimism  ;  their  large  and 
lustrous  eyes  seem  to  hold  all  the  stars 
in  their  astonishment  ;  their  fascinating 
absence  of  nose  seems  to  give  to  us  the 
most  perfect  hint  of  the  humour  that 
awaits  us  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  DETECTIVE 
STORIES 

IN  attempting  to  reach  the  genuine 
psychological  reason  for  the  popularity 
of  detective  stories,  it  is  necessary  to  rid 
ourselves  of  many  mere  phrases.  It  is  not 
true,  for  example,  that  the  populace  prefer 
bad  literature  to  good,  and  accept  detec- 
tive stories  because  they  are  bad  literature. 
The  mere  absence  of  artistic  subtlety  does 
not  make  a  book  popular.  Bradshaw's 
Railway  Guide  contains  few  gleams  of 
psychological  comedy,  yet  it  is  not  read 
aloud  uproariously  on  winter  evenings.  If 
detective  stories  are  read  with  more  exu- 
berance than  railway  guides,  it  is  certainly 
because  they  are  more  artistic.  Many 
good  books  have  fortunately  been  popular  ; 
many  bad  books,  still  more  fortunately, 
have  been  unpopular.  A  good  detective 
story  would  probably  be  even  more  popular 
than  a  bad  one.  The  trouble  in  this  matter 
is  that  many  people  do  not  realize  that 
there  is  such  a  thing  as  a  good  detective 
story  ;  it  is  to  them  like  speaking  of  a 
good  devil.     To  write  a  story  about  a  bur- 


DEFENCE  OF  DETECTIVE  STORIES  119 

glary  is,  in  their  eyes,  a  sort  of  spiritual 
manner  of  committing  it.  To  persons  of 
somewhat  weak  sensibility  this  is  natural 
enough  ;  it  must  be  confessed  that  many 
detective  stories  are  as  full  of  sensational 
crime  as  one  of  Shakespeare's  plays. 

There  is,  however,  between  a  good  de- 
tective story  and  a  bad  detective  story  as 
much,  or,  rather  more,  difference  than  there 
is  between  a  good  epic  and  a  bad  one. 
Not  only  is  a  detective  story  a  perfectly 
legitimate  form  of  art,  but  it  has  certain 
definite  and  real  advantages  as  an  agent 
of  the  public  weal. 

The  first  essential  value  of  the  detective 
story  lies  in  this,  that  it  is  the  earliest  and 
only  form  of  popular  literature  in  which 
is  expressed  some  sense  of  the  poetry  of 
modern  life.  Men  lived  among  mighty 
mountains  and  eternal  forests  for  ages 
before  they  realized  that  they  were  poetical; 
it  may  reasonably  be  inferred  that  some  of 
our  descendants  may  see  the  chimney-pots 
as  rich  a  purple  as  the  mountain-peaks, 
and  find  the  lamp-posts  as  old  and  natural 
as  the  trees.  Of  this  realization  of  a  great 
city  itself  as  something  wild  and  obvious 
the  detective  story  is  certainly  the  '  Iliad. 
No  one  can  have  failed  to  notice  that  in 
these  stories  the  hero  or  the  investigator 
crosses   London   with    something    of    the 


120  THE  DEFENDANT 

loneliness  and  liberty  of  a  prince  in  a  tale 
of  elfland,  that  in  the  course  of  that  incal- 
culable journey  the  casual  omnibus  assumes 
the  primal  colours  of  a  fairy  ship.  The 
lights  of  the  city  begin  to  glow  like  in- 
numerable goblin  eyes,  since  they  are  the 
guardians  of  some  secret,  however  crude, 
which  the  writer  knows  and  the  reader 
does  not.  Every  twist  of  the  road  is  like 
a  finger  pointing  to  it ;  every  fantastic 
skyline  of  chimney-pots  seems  wildly  and 
derisively  signalling  the  meaning  of  the 
mystery. 

This  realization  of  the  poetry  of  London 
is  not  a  small  thing.  A  city  is,  properly 
speaking,  more  poetic  even  than  a  country- 
side, for  while  Nature  is  a  chaos  of  uncon- 
scious forces,  a  city  is  a  chaos  of  conscious 
ones.  The  crest  of  the  flower  or  the 
pattern  of  the  lichen  may  or  may  not  be 
significant  symbols.  But  there  is  no  stone 
in  the  street  and  no  brick  in  the  wall  that 
is  not  actually  a  deliberate  symbol — a  mes- 
sage from  some  man,  as  much  as  if  it  were 
a  telegram  or  a  post-card.  The  narrowest 
street  possesses,  in  every  crook  and  twist 
of  its  intention,  the  soul  of  the  man  who 
built  it,  perhaps  long  in  his  grave.  Every 
brick  has  as  human  a  hieroglyph  as  if  it 
were  a  graven  brick  of  Babylon ;  every 
slate  on  the  roof  is  as  educational  a  docu- 


DEFENCE  OF  DETECTIVE  STORIES  121 

ment  as  if  it  were  a  slate  covered  with  addi- 
tion and  subtraction  sums.  Anything  which 
tends,  even  under  the  fantastic  form  of 
the  minutiae  of  Sherlock  Holmes,  to  assert 
this  romance  of  detail  in  civilization,  to 
emphasize  this  unfathomably  human  char- 
acter in  flints  and  tiles,  is  a  good  thing. 
It  is  good  that  the  average  man  should  fall 
into  the  habit  of  looking  imaginatively  at 
ten  men  in  the  street  even  if  it  is  only  on 
the  chance  that  the  eleventh  might  be  a 
notorious  thief.  We  may  dream,  perhaps, 
that  it  might  be  possible  to  have  another 
and  higher  romance  of  London,  that  men's 
souls  have  stranger  adventures  than  their 
bodies,  and  that  it  would  be  harder  and 
more  exciting  to  hunt  their  virtues  than 
to  hunt  their  crimes.  But  since  our  great 
authors  (with  the  admirable  exception  of 
Stevenson)  decline  to  write  of  that  thrilling 
mood  and  moment  when  the  eyes  of  the 
great  city,  like  the  eyes  of  a  cat,  begin  to 
flame  in  the  dark,  we  must  give  fair  credit 
to  the  popular  literature  which,  amid  a 
babble  of  pedantry  and  preciosity,  declines 
to  regard  the  present  as  prosaic  or  the 
common  as  commonplace.  Popular  art  in 
all  ages  has  been  interested  in  contem- 
porary manners  and  costume ;  it  dressed 
the  groups  around  the  Crucifixion  in  the 
garb  of  Florentine  gentlefolk  or  Flemish 


122  THE  DEFENDANT 

burghers.  In  the  last  century  it  was  the 
custom  for  distinguished  actors  to  present 
Macbeth  in  a  powdered  wig  and  ruffles. 
How  far  we  are  ourselves  in  this  age  from 
such  conviction  of  the  poetry  of  our  own  life 
and  manners  may  easily  be  conceived  by 
anyone  who  chooses  to  imagine  a  picture  of 
Alfred  the  Great  toasting  the  cakes  dressed 
in  tourist's  knickerbockers,  or  a  performance 
of  '  Hamlet '  in  which  the  Prince  appeared 
in  a  frock-coat,  with  a  crape  band  round 
his  hat.  But  this  instinct  of  the  age  to 
look  back,  like  Lot's  wife,  could  not  go  on 
for  ever.  A  rude,  popular  literature  of 
the  romantic  possibilities  of  the  modern 
city  was  bound  to  arise.  It  has  arisen  in 
the  popular  detective  stories,  as  rough  and 
refreshing  as  the  ballads  of  Robin  Hood. 

There  is,  however,  another  good  work 
that  is  done  by  detective  stories.  While 
it  is  the  constant  tendency  of  the  Old 
Adam  to  rebel  against  so  universal  and 
automatic  a  thing  as  civilization,  to  preach 
departure  and  rebellion,  the  romance  of 
police  activity  keeps  in  some  sense  before 
the  mind  the  fact  that  civilization  itself 
is  the  most  sensational  of  departures  and 
the  most  romantic  of  rebellions.  By  deal- 
ing with  the  unsleeping  sentinels  who 
guard  the  outposts  of  society,  it  tends  to 
remind  us  that  we  live  in  an  armed  camp, 


DEFENCE  OF  DETECTIVE  STORIES  123 

making  war  with  a  chaotic  world,  and  that 
the  criminals,  the  children  of  chaos,  are 
nothing  but  the  traitors  within  our  gates. 
When  the  detective  in  a  police  romance 
stands  alone,  and  somewhat  fatuously 
fearless  amid  the  knives  and  fists  of  a 
thieves'  kitchen,  it  does  certainly  serve  to 
make  us  remember  that  it  is  the  agent  of 
social  justice  who  is  the  original  and  poetic 
figure,  while  the  burglars  and  footpads  are 
merely  placid  old  cosmic  conservatives, 
happy  in  the  immemorial  respectability  of 
apes  and  wolves.  The  romance  of  the 
police  force  is  thus  the  whole  romance  of 
man.  It  is  based  on  the  fact  that  morality 
is  the  most  dark  and  daring  of  conspiracies. 
It  reminds  us  that  the  whole  noiseless  and 
unnoticeable  police  management  by  which 
we  are  ruled  and  protected  is  only  a  suc- 
cessful knight-errantry. 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PATRIOTISM 

THE  decay  of  patriotism  in  England 
during  the  last  year  or  two  is  a 
serious  and  distressing  matter.  Only  in 
consequence  of  such  a  decay  could  the 
current  lust  of  territory  be  confounded  with 
the  ancient  love  of  country.  We  may 
imagine  that  if  there  were  no  such  thing 
as  a  pair  of  lovers  left  in  the  world,  all  the 
vocabulary  of  love  might  without  rebuke 
be  transferred  to  the  lowest  and  most 
automatic  desire.  If  no  type  of  chivalrous 
and  purifying  passion  remained,  there  would 
be  no  one  left  to  say  that  lust  bore  none 
of  the  marks  of  love,  that  lust  was  rapacious 
and  love  pitiful,  that  lust  was  blind  and 
love  vigilant,  that  lust  sated  itself  and 
love  was  insatiable.  So  it  is  with  the 
'  love  of  the  city,'  that  high  and  ancient 
intellectual  passion  which  has  been  written 
in  red  blood  on  the  same  table  with  the 
primal  passions  of  our  being.  On  all  sides 
we  hear  to-day  of  the  love  of  our  country, 
and  yet  anyone  who  has  literally  such  a 
love  must  be  bewildered  at  the  talk,  like  a 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PATRIOTISM      125 

man  hearing  all  men  say  that  the  moon 
shines  by  day  and  the  sun  by  night.  The 
conviction  must  come  to  him  at  last  that 
these  men  do  not  realize  what  the  word 
'  love '  means,  that  they  mean  by  the  love  of 
country,  not  what  a  mystic  might  mean  by 
the  love  of  God,  but  something  of  what  a 
child  might  mean  by  the  love  of  jam.  To 
one  who  loves  his  fatherland,  for  instance, 
our  boasted  indifference  to  the  ethics  of  a 
national  war  is  mere  mysterious  gibberism. 
It  is  like  telling  a  man  that  a  boy  has 
committed  murder,  but  that  he  need  not 
mind  because  it  is  only  his  son.  Here 
clearly  the  word  'love'  is  used  unmeaningly. 
It  is  the  essence  of  love  to  be  sensitive,  it 
is  a  part  of  its  doom ;  and  anyone  who 
objects  to  the  one  must  certainly  get  rid  of 
the  other.  This  sensitiveness,  rising  some- 
times to  an  almost  morbid  sensitiveness, 
was  the  mark  of  all  great  lovers  like 
Dante  and  all  great  patriots  like  Chatham. 
'  My  country,  right  or  wrong,'  is  a  thing 
that  no  patriot  would  think  of  saying 
except  in  a  desperate  case.  It  is  like  say- 
ing, '  My  mother,  drunk  or  sober.'  No 
doubt  if  a  decent  man's  mother  took  to 
drink  he  would  share  her  troubles  to  the 
last  ;  but  to  talk  as  if  he  would  be  in  a 
state  of  gay  indifference  as  to  whether  his 
mother  took  to  drink  or  not  is  certainly 


126  THE  DEFENDANT 

not  the  language  of  men  who  know  the 
great  mystery. 

What  we  really  need  for  the  frustration 
and  overthrow  of  a  deaf  and  raucous  Jingo- 
ism is  a  renascence  of  the  love  of  the  native 
land.  When  that  comes,  all  shrill  cries 
will  cease  suddenly.  For  the  first  of  all 
the  marks  of  love  is  seriousness  :  love  will 
not  accept  sham  bulletins  or  the  empty 
victory  of  words.  It  will  always  esteem 
the  most  candid  counsellor  the  best.  Love 
is  drawn  to  truth  by  the  unerring  magnet- 
ism of  agony  ;  it  gives  no  pleasure  to  the 
lover  to  see  ten  doctors  dancing  with 
vociferous  optimism  round  a  death-bed. 

We  have  to  ask,  then,  Why  is  it  that 
this  recent  movement  in  England,  which 
has  honestly  appeared  to  many  a  re- 
nascence of  patriotism,  seems  to  us  to  have 
none  of  the  marks  of  patriotism — at  least, 
of  patriotism  in  its  highest  form  ?  Why 
has  the  adoration  of  our  patriots  been 
given  wholly  to  qualities  and  circumstances 
good  in  themselves,  but  comparatively 
material  and  trivial : — trade,  physical  force, 
a  skirmish  at  a  remote  frontier,  a  squabble 
in  a  remote  continent  ?  Colonies  are 
things  to  be  proud  of,  but  for  a  country 
to  be  only  proud  of  its  extremities  is  like  a 
man  being  only  proud  of  his  legs.  Why  is 
there  not  a  high  central  intellectual  patriot- 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PATRIOTISM      127 

ism,  a  patriotism  of  the  head  and  heart  of 
the  Empire,  and  not  merely  of  its  fists  and 
its  boots  ?  A  rude  Athenian  sailor  may 
very  likely  have  thought  that  the  glory  of 
Athens  lay  in  rowing  with  the  right  kind 
of  oars,  or  having  a  good  supply  of  garlic  ; 
but  Pericles  did  not  think  that  this  was 
the  glory  of  Athens.  With  us,  on  the 
other  hand,  there  is  no  difference  at  all 
between  the  patriotism  preached  by  Mr. 
Chamberlain  and  that  preached  by  Mr. 
Pat  Bafferty,  who  sings  '  What  do  you 
think  of  the  Irish  now  V  They  are  both 
honest,  simple-minded,  vulgar  eulogies 
upon  trivialities  and  truisms. 

I  have,  rightly  or  wrongly,  a  notion  of 
the  chief  cause  of  this  pettiness  in  English 
patriotism  of  to-day,  and  I  will  attempt  to 
expound  it.  It  may  be  taken  generally 
that  a  man  loves  his  own  stock  and  environ- 
ment, and  that  he  will  find  something  to 
praise  in  it ;  but  whether  it  is  the  most 
praiseworthy  thing  or  no  will  depend  upon 
the  man's  enlightenment  as  to  the  facts. 
If  the  son  of  Thackeray,  let  us  say,  were 
brought  up  in  ignorance  of  his  father's  fame 
and  genius,  it  is  not  improbable  that  he 
would  be  proud  of  the  fact  that  his  father 
was  over  six  feet  high.  It  seems  to  me  that 
we,  as  a  nation,  are  precisely  in  the  position 
of  this  hypothetical  child  of  Thackeray's. 


128  THE  DEFENDANT 

We  fall  back  upon  gross  and  frivolous  things 
for  our  patriotism,  for  a  simple  reason.  We 
are  the  only  people  in  the  world  who  are 
not  taught  in  childhood  our  own  literature 
and  our  own  history. 

We  are,  as  a  nation,  in  the  truly  extra- 
ordinary condition  of  not  knowing  our  own 
merits.  We  have  played  a  great  and 
splendid  part  in  the  history  of  universal 
thought  and  sentiment ;  we  have  been  among 
the  foremost  in  that  eternal  and  bloodless 
battle  in  which  the  blows  do  not  slay,  but 
create.  In  painting  and  music  we  are 
inferior  to  many  other  nations ;  but  in 
literature,  science,  philosophy,  and  political 
eloquence,  if  history  be  taken  as  a  whole, 
we  can  hold  our  own  with  any.  But  all 
this  vast  heritage  of  intellectual  glory  is 
kept  from  our  schoolboys  like  a  heresy  ; 
and  they  are  left  to  live  and  die  in  the  dull 
and  infantile  type  of  patriotism  which  they 
learnt  from  a  box  of  tin  soldiers.  There  is 
no  harm  in  the  box  of  tin  soldiers ;  we  do 
not  expect  child/en  to  be  equally  delighted 
with  a  beautiful  box  of  tin  philanthropists. 
But  there  is  great  harm  in  the  fact  that 
the  subtler  and  more  civilized  honour  of 
England  is  not  presented  so  as  to  keep 
pace  with  the  expanding  mind.  A  French 
boy  is  taught  the  glory  of  Moliere  as  well 
as  that  of  Turenne ;  a  German  boy  is  taught 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PATRIOTISM      129 

his  own  great  national  philosophy  before 
he  learns  the  philosophy  of  antiquity. 
The  result  is  that,  though  French 
patriotism  is  often  crazy  and  boast- 
ful, though  German  patriotism  is  often 
isolated  and  pedantic,  they  are  neither  of 
them  merely  dull,  common,  and  brutal,  as 
is  so  often  the  strange  fate  of  the  nation  of 
Bacon  and  Locke.  It  is  natural  enough, 
and  even  righteous  enough,  under  the 
circumstances.  An  Englishman  must  love 
England  for  something ;  consequently,  he 
tends  to  exalt  commerce  or  prize-fighting, 
just  as  a  German  might  tend  to  exalt 
music,  or  a  Flamand  to  exalt  painting, 
because  he  really  believes  it  is  the  chief 
merit  of  his  fatherland.  It  would  not  be  in 
the  least  extraordinary  if  a  claim  of  eating 
up  provinces  and  pulling  down  princes  were 
the  chief  boast  of  a  Zulu.  The  extra- 
ordinary thing  is,  that  it  is  the  chief  boast 
of  a  people  who  have  Shakespeare,  Newton, 
Burke,  and  Darwin  to  boast  of. 

The  peculiar  lack  of  any  generosity  or 
delicacy  in  the  current  English  nationalism 
appears  to  have  no  other  possible  origin 
but  in  this  fact  of  our  unique  neglect  in 
education  of  the  study  of  the  national 
literature.  An  Englishman  could  not  be 
silly  enough  to  despise  other  nations  if  he 
once  knew  how  much  England  had  done 

9 


130  THE  DEFENDANT 

for  them.  Great  men  of  letters  cannot 
avoid  being  humane  and  universal.  The 
absence  of  the  teaching  of  English  litera- 
ture in  our  schools  is,  when  we  come  to 
think  of  it,  an  almost  amazing  pheno- 
menon. It  is  even  more  amazing  when 
we  listen  to  the  arguments  urged  by  head- 
masters and  other  educational  conser- 
vatives against  the  direct  teaching  of 
English.  It  is  said,  for  example,  that  a 
vast  amount  of  English  grammar  and 
literature  is  picked  up  in  the  course  of 
learning  Latin  and  Greek.  This  is  perfectly 
true,  but  the  topsy-turviness  of  the  idea 
never  seems  to  strike  them.  It  is  like 
saying  that  a  baby  picks  up  the  art  of 
walking  in  the  course  of  learning  to  hop, 
or  that  a  Frenchman  may  successfully  be 
taught  German  by  helping  a  Prussian  to 
learn  Ashanti.  Surely  the  obvious  founda- 
tion of  all  education  is  the  language  in 
which  that  education  is  conveyed  ;  if  a 
boy  has  only  time  to  learn  one  thing,  he 
had'  better  learn  that. 

We  have  deliberately  neglected  this 
great  heritage  of  high  national  sentiment. 
We  have  made  our  public  schools  the 
strongest  walls  against  a  whisper  of  the 
honour  of  England.  And  we  have  had 
our  punishment  in  this  strange  and  per- 
verted fact  that,  while  a  unifying  vision 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PATRIOTISM      131 

of  patriotism  can  ennoble  bands  of  brutal 
savages  or  dingy  burghers,  and  be  the 
best  thing  in  their  lives,  we,  who  are — the 
world  being  judge — -humane,  honest,  and 
serious  individually,  have  a  patriotism  that 
is  the  worst  thing  in  ours.  What  have 
we  done,  and  where  have  we  wandered, 
we  that  have  produced  sages  who  could 
have  spoken  with  Socrates  and  poets  who 
could  walk  with  Dante,  that  we  should 
talk  as  if  we  have  never  done  anything 
more  intelligent  than  found  colonies  and 
kick  niggers  ?  We  are  the  children  of 
light,  and  it  is  we  that  sit  in  darkness. 
If  we  are  judged,  it  will  not  be  for  the 
merely  intellectual  transgression  of  failing 
to  appreciate  other  nations,  but  for  the 
supreme  spiritual  transgression  of  failing 
to  appreciate  ourselves. 


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BY 

LADY    DUFF    GORDON 

A  new  edition  in  one  volume,  including  the  '  Last 
Letters,'  revised  throughout  by  the  author's  daughter, 
Janet  ROSS  (author  of  'Three  Generations  of  English- 
women '),  in  which  numerous  passages  —  necessarily 
omitted  at  an  earlier  date — are  now  restored  to  their 
original  context.  Containing  the  Memoir  by  Mrs.  Ross, 
and  a  New  Introduction  by 

GEORGE    MEREDITH 

ILLUSTRATIONS.— 'Lady  Duff  Gordon,'  photogravure 
from  a  sketch  by  G.  F.  Watts,  R.A.  ;  'Sir  Alexander 
Duff  Gordon,'  from  a  sketch  by  G.  F.  Watts,  R.A.  ; 
'  Luxor,'  from  drawing  by  Edward  Lear  ;  '  Lady  Duff 
Gordon,'  from  oil-painting  by  Henry  Phillips,  and  from 
a  sketch  by  a  school  friend  ;   '  Omar,'  from  a  photograph. 

Cloth,  large  crown  8vo.,  7s.  6d.  net. 


SOME     PRESS     OPINIONS. 

'This  is,  of  course,  the  edition  of  the  "Letters"  that  must  in 
future  be  quoted.' — Guardian. 

'  That  delightful  book.  .  .  .  An  edition  which  must  necessarily 
supersede  all  its  predecessors.' — Standard. 

'It  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  of  these  letters  that  it  is  impossible 
to  imagine  anyone  to  whom  they  could  be  uninteresting.'  —  St. 
James 's  Gazette. 

'  Altogether  this  is  a  book  to  buy,  to  read,  and  to  re-read.  In 
printing  and  general  appearance  it  leaves  nothing  to  be  desired.' — 
Pall  Mall  Gazette. 

'  A  very  welcome  reappearance.  This  is  a  very  handsome  edition.' 
—  World. 

'  Her  style  is  bright  and  unaffected,  with  a  strong  sense  of 
humour.' — Spectator. 

LONDON:     R.    BRIMLEY    JOHNSON, 
8,  York  Buildings,  W.C. 


THE   YORK   LIBRARY. 

A  series  of  reprints,  in  medium  i6mo.,  printed  from  a 
new  Venetian  type  on  hand-made  paper,  with  green  and 
black  title-page.  A  purple  buckram  gilt  cover,  with  a 
design  from  the  York  Gate  and  the  York  roses,  by  Miss 
Blanche  McManus.  Portrait  frontispieces  etched  by 
Mr.  H.  G.  Webb,  of  the  Caradoc  Press. 

i.  Rosamund     Gray     (and     Barbara 
S ).    By  Charles  Lamb. 

2.  Two    Love    Stories    (from    '  The 

Doctor,'  etc.).    By  Robert  Southey. 

3.  Amoretti   (including   the  Pro-   and 

Epi-thalamia).    By  Edmund  Spenser. 

4.  Songs    (from     the    Novels).       By 

Thomas  L.  Peacock. 

Hand-made  paper  edition,  2s.  6d.  net. 
Limited  editions  on  Japanese  vellum,  7s.  6d.  net. 


OPINIONS    OF   THE    PRESS. 

'A  dainty  issue.' — Sheffield  Independent. 

'Dainty,  portable,  in  most  readable  type.' — Punch. 

'  We  hope  that  so  tasteful  an  edition  will  bring  new  readers 
to  Lamb.' — Saturday  Review . 

'  Lamb  and  Southey  are  welcome  for  themselves,  but  when 
beautifully  printed  and  neatly  bound,  the  welcome  must 
necessarily  be  warmer.' — Birmingham  Gazette. 


LONDON:    R.    BRIMLEY    JOHNSON, 
8   York  Buildings,  W.C. 


